“In Auschwitz, I never gave up hope,” Dr. Edith Eva Eger says when asked what her message is to the Israeli people at this traumatic time, almost a year after the October 7 attack. “In Auschwitz, I never gave up hope. It’s temporary, and you take one day at a time. Every moment is an opportunity for an opportunity. You change your mind, you change your life. Don't give up hope."
Dr. Edie, as she is popularly known, is an award-winning American writer, Holocaust survivor and clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of PTSD. We interviewed her together with her grandson, Jordan Engle, on Zoom ahead of her 97th birthday on September 29 and the October 1 launch of her third book, The Ballerina of Auschwitz (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster), from their home in La Jolla, California.
“The Book of Hope,” as she calls it, is a young adult edition of her bestselling 2017 memoir, The Choice, which she published at the age of 90, followed by The Gift (2020).
What motivated her to write a book for younger readers?
“Because they are the ambassadors for peace and goodwill. I think they are the future. I think it’s very important for us to let them know what they can be: survivors and not victims of anything or anyone at any time.”
Jordan, the son of Eger’s daughter Marianne and her economist husband, Nobel laureate Robert Engle, elaborated: “When Edie was in Auschwitz, she never gave up hope, even when it seemed hopeless. “In the very fabric of her being, she never stopped believing that she would survive. We think The Ballerina of Auschwitz is such an important book, not just for young people but for all people. It is a story of the moment of survival. What do you do when you’re at that crossroads, and you have to decide, do I give up, or do I keep it strong? Do I keep a vision in my mind of what I want to survive for, who I want to become in the future, knowing that if I stop now, none of that will happen?”
Edie's life
Born in Czechoslovakia, Edie became a member of the Hungarian Olympic gymnastics team and a talented ballet dancer before most of her family was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It was there, she says, that the infamous Dr. Mengele made her dance for him on the same evening that her mother died in the gas chambers, rewarding her with a loaf of bread which she shared with other girls.
While Edie’s beloved boyfriend Eric was also murdered, she and her sister Magda, a pianist, survived the horrors of Auschwitz (Another sister, Klara, a violinist, also survived by being hidden by her music teacher). After being liberated by American troops in 1945, she married another survivor, Béla Eger, whom she met in the hospital, made her way to the US, started a family, befriended the famous psychologist Viktor Frankl, and opened her own clinic in La Jolla.
“Auschwitz was a classroom, and I learned to think and change my thinking,” she says. “This is my revenge. I have three children, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, who are all wonderful. I’m very happy to be 97 on September 29. I’m going to have the happiest birthday ever.”
Asked about her feelings for Judaism and Israel, she smiles. “I love Israel. I once thought I could live in Israel and teach in Israel,” she says. “We Jews survived so much, and we’re still surviving. I am a very proud Jew, and a very, very proud Jewish woman.”
Regarding her outlook on life, she says: “We can choose how we live now. You can’t heal what you don’t feel. I can’t change the past, but I can use this moment to make the world a better place. There is a life that I can change, and it’s mine.”
Jordan adds that he and Dr. Edie are working on a new documentary about her philosophy. “What Edie does is she gives you a way to look at the traumatic event that happens to you as something which can make you stronger. If you choose to look at it that way, what happened to you as a strength not a weakness, and you can become kind to others by sharing the strength of what happened to you. So we’re constantly on this mission to help other people take on Edie’s message about healing yourself.”