Power to Unlock Personal Prison Lies Within Self

Edith Eva Eger couldn’t possibly have imagined when she was surrounded by starvation, torture and death in a Nazi concentration camp at age 16 that she would someday be giving motivational talks based on what she learned from the Holocaust.

Both her parents died in the gas chambers, and she was found among the dead by an American soldier when her camp was liberated in 1945.

But Eger, now a 64-year-old La Jolla therapist and international consultant on the psychology of the survivor, doesn’t dwell on the horrors she endured in Auschwitz when she addresses audiences today. She recalls her experiences in the camp only to help people see beyond their own emotional pain and believe her when she tells them that--no matter what they have had to face or how much they have suffered--inner freedom and self-renewal are within their reach.

That’s the message Eger brought to a recent breakfast meeting of the Inside Edge, a self-development group for people from all walks of life who meet weekly to support each other’s quests for personal and professional fulfillment.

Eger, who addressed about 50 early risers during a 6:30 a.m. meeting in Costa Mesa, delivered a talk titled “New Beginnings: Giving Birth to Yourself” that challenged her listeners to examine the ways in which they have allowed themselves to be imprisoned by their past.

“Are you locked in your own concentration camp in your mind?” asked Eger, who emigrated to America in 1949 with her husband and 2-month-old baby.

Freedom is “really all about not allowing anyone else to keep you as a hostage”--including your own family, according to Eger. It’s about forgiving, letting go and moving on. And it grows out of the kind of inner strength that Eger discovered when she and her sister, Magda, were prisoners in Auschwitz.

In an essay she wrote for a professional journal, Eger explained: “I went from feeling myself victimized by our keepers to the realization that I quite possibly had the inner resources to outlast them. That somehow I could match their collective decision to eliminate us as human beings and Jews with my determination to live.”

Eger was inspired by something her mother told her shortly before she died: “Remember, what you put inside your brain, no one can take away.”

The therapist said she has used that lesson in her practice to help all kinds of victims--including battered wives, soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivors of sexual abuse--develop the inner resources to recover from their emotional wounds and learn how to find joy in life.

Eger got her first glimpse of the “power from within” that she would use to survive Auschwitz on the day she arrived in the camp, when she was forced to dance for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele shortly after he sent her parents to the gas chamber.

A Nazi soldier asked the newcomers in her barracks what “talents” they had brought to the camp, and Eger, who had studied gymnastics and ballet and had been considered a possible Olympic contender in Hungary, was pushed forward. Soon she was standing before Mengele, the camp’s chief medical officer. He ordered her to dance while a full orchestra of prisoners who would later be executed played the “Blue Danube Waltz.”

“I closed my eyes and took myself far away to the Budapest Opera House and imagined that I was Juliet starting a mournful dance above the body of Romeo,” recalled Eger, who was given a crust of bread by Mengele for her performance and then sent back to the barracks.

Today, Eger tells that story as a reminder that we all have the mental power to separate--and protect--ourselves from the destructiveness of others.

“No one rejects me but me. No one puts me down but me,” she said. “You have as much power over me as I allow you to have. That’s what I learned in Auschwitz when I was dancing for Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death.”

Eger, who endured a number of severe beatings and nearly died of starvation before she and her sister were liberated from the Nazis, urged her audience in Costa Mesa to use their own suffering as “raw material” for growth.

Referring to her 15 months in Auschwitz and other camps, where her weight dropped to 40 pounds, she said: “I wouldn’t give up that experience for anything because that’s what made me what I am--a person who doesn’t judge, a person who is able to listen and to crawl under someone else’s skin and give empathy.

“I don’t think I will ever overcome what happened to me in Auschwitz,” she added. “Every time I turn around I have flashbacks. But I concentrate on what I still have rather than what I lost.”

Eger, who has three children and four grandchildren, said she was determined when she came to America to lead a productive life--”to keep going on and giving birth to the me that would never allow the enemy to take residence in my body.”

But for years, she ran away from that enemy, trying to bury the past by assimilating as much as possible into American culture.

“I came to America and became addicted to becoming a high achiever because I wanted to be just like you,” said Eger, who still has a thick Hungarian accent in spite of her efforts to lose it.

For years, she tried to forget the girl who had been near death in a concentration camp. But as she and her husband became more financially secure, she grew increasingly restless. She realized when she began studying psychology at age 40 that she had to face her past in order to put it behind her, and she ended a long period of silence and denial by delving into her history through her academic work.

But it wasn’t until she returned to Auschwitz about four years ago--to mourn the dead, relive the horror, reclaim her innocence and forgive herself for surviving--that she felt truly liberated.

She urged her audience of Inside Edge members not to wait as long as she did to confront the past. “If you don’t know where you’ve been, I don’t think you know where you’re heading, either,” she said. “To be free, you must face what you fear.”

For Eger, however, revisiting the concentration camp wasn’t enough. To move on, she also had to let go of her hatred toward the Nazis.

“If I would hate today I would still be a prisoner,” she said. “To me every moment is precious because I was given a second chance in life. My life is post-mortem, and I have no time to hate.

“I’ve found out that the only way I can forgive and let go is by crawling under the skin of my enemy and acknowledging that I’m made of the same stuff they are. Once I do that, I can look at Hitler as God’s child, and acknowledge that somehow it could have been me.”

That reminds her, she said, “that I have choices every morning as to who I will reach for within me.”

Placing blame is a child’s way of dealing with pain, she observed. She understands that impulse, however, because at 16, she struggled with the question of how God could have allowed the Holocaust to happen. But today she can say matter-of-factly: “God didn’t kill my parents. People operating on age-old prejudices did. People must take responsibility for thoughts, feelings and behavior rather than passively looking up and blaming God.”

One of the ways in which Eger has taken responsibility for the hatred she has worked so hard to release is by going to Germany to speak to children of former Nazis about their guilt. She feels it’s important for her to communicate with them because “it’s really hard to debase a person you know into an object. I refuse to judge the German people by the 12 years of Hitlerites.”

The steps Eger has taken to become “not merely a survivor but a victor” have been so healing that she speaks from experience when she talks about rebirth: “My life has been a series of new beginnings. Every morning is a new beginning.”

Her advice to those who want to be able to say that too: “All you have to do is acknowledge that whatever was done to you, you don’t have to do to yourself. Yesterday’s victims do not have to become today’s victimizers.”

She said that learning to express feelings is another essential step toward gaining the freedom to become “the real you.”

“If, like me, you were not allowed to be a child, you may run into the same difficulties I do. It’s hard to just laugh from the belly and just be plain silly,” she noted.

For many, it’s also difficult to face the pain that may be a necessary passage to self-renewal.

As Eger put it: “How can you turn life into celebration? Are you willing to acknowledge that suffering is feeling and that, without feeling, we just go through the motions in life? How many people run to a doctor for a pill when they’re suffering from grief? But grief is not an illness, and it doesn’t need to be medicated. We mustn’t anesthetize feelings.”