finding freedom
Finding freedom
Edith Eger, a Czechoslovakian Jew, was only sixteen when, in 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz. She was sent on death marches and into forced slave labour, where she endured unimaginable horrors, starvation and brutality. She was made a human shield for Nazi ammunition in a thin striped dress lying on top of German trains. And finally, emaciated and infested, she was left for dead in a pile of bodies.
After her liberation it took years for her to work through the trauma and damage and guilt, overcoming enormous obstacles – both external and internal – to become an acclaimed psychologist and psychotherapist.
Her book,The Choice, (written with co-author, Esme Schwall Weigand) is not simply another account of survival during the Holocaust. That’s a profound and powerful part of it, but Dr Eger weaves her own personal experiences together with clinical cases where, in her professional capacity, she has used the wisdom she gained to help her patients to confront their suffering and free themselves from the shackles that imprison their minds. And in the process she finds her own redemption.
She writes stories:
…stories of choices, big and small, that can lead us from trauma to triumph, from darkness to light, from imprisonment to freedom.
She shares deep and wise insights:
Suffering is universal. Victimhood is optional.
There is no hierarchy of suffering.
Our painful experiences aren’t a liability – they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
It’s not what happens that matters – it’s what you do with it.
She has high ambitions:
…to help you escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be.
…to experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief – and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life.
She knows her own limitations:
Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end – these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or exised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.
She has arrived at a most important perspective:
…the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are – human, imperfect, and whole.
Revisiting Auschwitz, she discovers a profound anomaly:
This is the geometry of systematic torture and death. Mathematical annihilation.
The immensity crushes.
There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory.
Here in the world’s biggest cemetery there is not one single grave.
A colleague, Professor Philip Zimbardo, sums up the reach of The Choice:
…extraordinary chronicle of heroism and healing, resiliency and compassion, survival with dignity, mental toughness, and moral courage. All of us can learn from Dr Eger’s inspiring cases and riveting personal story to heal our own lives.