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INTERVIEW EDITH EGER
07.07.17
www.thebookseller.com
Edith Eger
Holocaust survivor and acclaimed psychologist Edith Eger talks about her extraordinary memoir
BY CAROLINE SANDERSON
September) by 89-year-old Edith Eger particularly remarkable is that living to write of the horrors of Auschwitz constitutes only the first part of her story. An internationally acclaimed psychologist, Eger also
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relates how she found the steel and the spirit not only to recover from her own terrible experience, but to use the life wisdom she gained in so doing to help other victims of trauma. In The Choice she writes: “What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I have learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control . . . Suffering is universal. Victimhood is optional.” Speaking to me down the line from her home in La Jolla, California, Eger’s Eastern European accent is still
rom Anne Frank to Primo Levi, there are many Holocaust survival memoirs, and each is a tale that must be told. What makes The Choice (Rider,
clearly discernible. Why has she chosen to write this book now? “That’s a wonderful question! Something inside me said: ‘If not now, when?’ It was something that I just had to do. It wasn’t easy. But look at your birth certificate. Does it say life is easy?” Eger was born in 1927 into a Jewish family in
the Slovakian city of Košice, which at the time was Hungarian territory. In her teens, she was a talented ballet dancer and gymnast who had begun training for a future Olympic Games. Her ballet teacher told her. “All your ecstasy in life will come from inside.” But when the shadow of Nazism fell over Eastern Europe, Eger was no longer permitted to train with the team. In 1943, she and her parents and sister Magda were deported to Auschwitz. When they arrived, the sisters were separated, first from their father, and then, at the direction of Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death, from their mother. “You’re going to see your mother very soon,” he told them. “She’s just going to take a shower.” The moment that Eger last saw her mother has haunted her ever since. It was the most
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It was a tremendous wake-up call for me to reclaim myself, my one-of-a-kindness, my authentic self . . . I knew I had to go back to try and understand
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