Edith Eger

Edith Eger is the youngest daughter of Lajos and Ilona Elefánt, Jewish people from Hungary in what was at the time of her birth Czechoslovakia. Her father was a tailor.[3][1]

Her hometown, Košice, belonged to Hungary before June 1920 and after 1938 and was called Kassa during that time. Eger attended gymnasium high school and took ballet lessons. She was member of the Hungarian Olympic team in gymnastics.[4][5] In 1942 the Hungarian government enacted new anti-Jewish laws and she was removed from the gymnastics team. Her elder sister Clara was a violin player and was admitted to the Conservatory of Budapest. During the war Clara was hidden by her music teacher.[6] Her sister Magda was a pianist.

In March 1944, Eger was forced to live in the Košice ghetto with her parents and Magda. In April they were forced to stay in a brick factory with 12,000 other Jews for a month.[1] In May of that year they were deported to Auschwitz. When she was selected for the gas chamber, she was separated from her mother by Josef Mengele. Her mother died in the gas chamber. In her memoirs, Eger relates that the same evening Mengele made her dance for him in her barracks.[5] As a "thank you", she received a loaf of bread that she shared with other girls.[7]

According to her memoirs, she stayed in various camps, among which Mauthausen.[6] The Nazis evacuated Mauthausen and other concentration camps as the Americans and Russians approached.[1] Eger was sent on a death march with her sister Magda to the Gunskirchen concentration camp,[8] at a distance of about 55 kilometers. When she couldn't walk further as she was exhausted, one of the girls with whom she had shared Mengele's bread recognized her and carried her on together with Magda.[7] Conditions in Gunskirchen were so bad that Eger had to eat grass to survive, while other prisoners turned to cannibalism.[9] When the U.S. military liberated the camp in May 1945, a soldier is said to have seen her hand move when, according to Eger, she was left for dead among a number of dead bodies. The soldier quickly sought medical attention and saved her life. She weighed 32 kilograms at the time, had a broken back, typhoid fever, pneumonia and pleurisy.[10][1]

Edith and Magda recovered in American field hospitals and returned to Kassa where they found their sister Clara. Their parents and Edith's fiancée Eric had not survived Auschwitz. She married Béla (Albert) Eger, whom she met in the hospital.[1] He was also a Jewish survivor; he had joined the partisans during the war. In 1949, after threats from the communists, they fled together with their daughter to the United States. There she suffered from her war trauma and survivor guilt, and did not want to talk about the war time to her three children.[1]

She befriended Viktor Frankl, went into therapy and received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1978. She also received her license to practise as a psychologist.[4] She opened a therapy clinic in La Jolla, California and was appointed to the University of California, San Diego.

In 1990, Eger returned to Auschwitz to face her repressed emotions. At the urging of Philip Zimbardo, she published her experiences in her first book The Choice in 2017.[10]

In her work as psychologist, she helps her clients to free themselves from their own thoughts, and helps them to ultimately choose for freedom. The Choice became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller.[11][12] In her second book The Gift (2020) she encourages the reader to change the thoughts that, according to Eger, imprison us and the destructive behaviors that would hinder us. What happens to us in life is in the end not the most important, she says. In Eger's view the most important is what we do with our lives.

Eger has appeared on CNN and the Oprah Winfrey Show.[7]

• The Choice - Embrace the Possible. Scribner, 2017,ISBN 9781501130786
• The Gift - 12 Lessons to Save Your Life. Ebury Publishing, 2020, ISBN 9781846046278