Book Review: Edith Eger on escaping mental prisons after surviving the Holocaust
American-Hungarian Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist and dancer Edith Eva Eger.
- The Gift
- Edith Eger
- Rider, €12.99
Edith Eger’s story is an extraordinary one.
She grew up in a normally happy Jewish family in the city of Košice in Slovakia. She was a ballet student, an excellent gymnast and had a boyfriend, Eric, who she was in love with.
In 1944, Košice now part of Hungary and called Kassa, the teenage Edith, her sister Magda and their parents were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, the culmination of years of anti-Jewish legislation and ever more severe restrictions.
There her parents were murdered on arrival. Edith was made to dance for Mengele, the camp’s depraved physician who oversaw the selections for the gas chamber. She received a loaf of bread for this, the sharing of which with her fellow inmates was to later save her life.
With the war coming to a close, she and Magda were among the prisoners sent on a forced march to Gunskirchen in Austria, where they were found at the liberation.
When discovered by an American soldier, who chanced to see some small movement in the pile of corpses in which she was lying, Edith had pleurisy, typhoid fever, pneumonia and a broken back. She had been reduced to eating grass to survive.
Her first love Eric had perished in the camps.
She and her husband Bela, who she had met in a sanatorium after the war, moved to the US in 1948 to escape the communists who had taken power in what was again Czechoslovakia.
In America she worked in a factory to provide for their three children, often struggling with poverty.
She began to study psychology, including the logotherapy of fellow holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, a therapy that focuses on the quest for a meaningful life.
In 1990 she gained a PhD from El Paso University in Texas.
It was from engaging in clinical work with patients suffering a wide variety of malaises that she realised that her own unhealed trauma got in the way of her work.
This prompted, amongst other reactions, a trip back to Auschwitz to confront her past.
Her first book, The Choice, a memoir of her experiences, was published when she was 90.
The Choice received fulsome praise from a wide variety of luminaries, from Oprah Winfrey to Bill Gates. The Times Literary Supplement described it as ‘a masterpiece of holocaust literature.’ The book under review is her second.
It is a compendium of case histories drawn from decades of clinical practice, interwoven with stories from her own life and the lives of family members.
The chapters have titles like The Prison of Paralysing Fear and The Prison of Guilt and Shame and come with neat summaries of their contents at the end.
Her voice is emphatically clear and she is not afraid to challenge accepted wisdoms. Time is not a healer, of itself, she says. It’s what one does with that time that counts. PTSD is not a disorder. It is a natural reaction to trauma.
She aims to help provide the reader, like her many patients over the years, with the key to unlocking the many kinds of mental prisons that people find themselves in, drawing on her experiences of Auschwitz which she says, strikingly, was a hell on earth, and also her best classroom.
She quotes something her mother said to her as they travelled in the cattle truck towards Auschwitz: ‘’No one can take away from you what you put in your mind.’’
This is, I believe, a book which will offer something of value to most readers, even those who might be resistant (often with very good reason), to the blandishments of the self-help genre.
This reviewer certainly found it a rewarding read.
