In 2017, Dr. Edith Eva Eger’s mon­u­men­tal mem­oir The Choice came out, detail­ing her sur­vival in Auschwitz and her life after the war as a renowned psy­chol­o­gist. The Bal­le­ri­na of Auschwitz is the young adult edi­tion of Dr. Eger’s mem­oir, and the author describes it as ​“the book I wish I could have read when I was six­teen.” JBC’s Michal Hoschan­der Malen spoke with Dr. Eger about writ­ing this book and revis­it­ing this time in her life, her work as a psy­chol­o­gist, and her out­look on life.

Michal Hoschan­der Malen: How have you main­tained a pos­i­tive atti­tude in the wake of your expe­ri­ences in Auschwitz? What gave you the strength to move forward?

Edith Eva Eger: I once worked with a beau­ti­ful cou­ple whose child had died. Both par­ents were deep in grief, strug­gling to stay con­nect­ed — with each oth­er, with their liv­ing chil­dren, with life itself — in the wake of such a dev­as­tat­ing and unex­pect­ed loss. It was as though their child died … and they died, too.

I faced a sim­i­lar reck­on­ing after the war. In heal­ing from the hor­rors I expe­ri­enced I also had to grieve what didn’t hap­pen: my par­ents would nev­er see me grad­u­ate from col­lege or become a moth­er; they would nev­er meet my future hus­band or dance at my wed­ding; they would nev­er cel­e­brate hol­i­days with my chil­dren or grand­chil­dren. Some­times the feel­ing of loss was so absolute and excru­ci­at­ing that I didn’t want to keep living.

Yet I real­ized that if I gave up on life, it wouldn’t do my par­ents any good. It wouldn’t bring them back. The best way to hon­or them and ensure they didn’t die in vain was to make my life stand for some­thing. To find mean­ing and pur­pose — and joy — in being alive. 

This hap­pened first in small ways: tast­ing cheese and sala­mi and fresh-baked bread; hear­ing my sis­ters play music; feel­ing my own body relearn how to dance. 

In begin­ning to savor tiny, every­day plea­sures, I became more open to life itself. I became curi­ous. I stopped ask­ing, ​“Why me?” and began to won­der, What will hap­pen next? I fell in love again. After all that death, I resumed the rhythm of life.

I tell my patients, ​“Pay atten­tion to what you’re pay­ing atten­tion to.” Think about your think­ing. If you think about fear, you’re going to have more fear. If you think about all the ways you’ve been let down, you’re going to expe­ri­ence more disappointment. 

While there’s no heal­ing in min­i­miz­ing our pain, we always get to choose whether to focus on what we’ve lost, or on what we have. The vio­lence of the Holo­caust was sense­less. And I sur­vived. And I choose to embrace the gift of life.

MHM: The Bal­le­ri­na of Auschwitz is the young adult adap­ta­tion of The Choice. Did you have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive when approach­ing the mate­r­i­al and writ­ing for this audience? 

EEE: Bal­le­ri­na is the book I wish I could have read when I was sixteen. 

I wrote this mem­oir from the point of view of my teenage self, yet there’s also a sense in which I wrote this book to the younger me. To the girl who was falling in love for the first time and seek­ing to find her place in her fam­i­ly and the larg­er world. To the girl whose life was inter­rupt­ed. Who stood in the bit­ter cold, wait­ing her turn in the selec­tion line, and won­dered, ​“Does any­one know I’m here?”

To that young girl, that long-ago me, I say, ​“You made it! You’re free!” And to the youth of today, fac­ing hard­ships and chal­lenges of their own, I say, ​“If I can do it, so can you.”

Writ­ing Bal­le­ri­na helped me see that my sto­ry of atroc­i­ty is also a love sto­ry. As I expe­ri­enced the worst of human­i­ty, our capac­i­ty for unspeak­able dark­ness and cru­el­ty, I also expe­ri­enced our capac­i­ty for hope and con­nec­tion. My sto­ry begins and ends with love — famil­ial love, roman­tic love, self-love. 

MHM: What do you hope young peo­ple will gain from read­ing The Bal­le­ri­na of Auschwitz?

EEE: I hope young peo­ple will har­ness the free­dom of choice in their lives. And I hope they will embrace their bril­liant, one-of-a-kind uniqueness.

I used to think that being strong meant get­ting as far away as pos­si­ble from my painful past. I tried for decades to out­run it, sup­press it, deny it. But in becom­ing a psy­chol­o­gist and help­ing oth­ers heal, I real­ized that if I was run­ning from my own past, I was still a prisoner. 

Young adults know all too well that there’s so much in their lives they can’t con­trol. We can’t choose what hap­pens to us, but we can always choose how we respond. There’s noth­ing more empow­er­ing than choic­es. I want my young read­ers to know that the more choic­es they have, the less they will be a vic­tim of any­one or anything. 

In this capac­i­ty to choose we find our free­dom — and our authen­tic­i­ty. I want my young read­ers to know: There will nev­er be anoth­er you. 

MHM: Could you speak about the expe­ri­ence of revis­it­ing your incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and influ­en­tial mem­oir to cre­ate The Bal­le­ri­na of Auschwitz?

EEE: Here’s some­thing I didn’t expect when I start­ed writ­ing my first book: It was hard­er for me to write The Choice than to sur­vive Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, all I had to do was get from one moment to the next. To write, I had to feel all the feelings. 

As I worked on Bal­le­ri­na, I had to feel it all again. I wrote in present tense — this is what I ask my patients to do when they tell me about a trau­mat­ic or painful expe­ri­ence, to tell it as though it is hap­pen­ing now. When we remem­ber in this way, we aren’t in our heads, intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing, talk­ing about the past. We’re reliv­ing it in a vis­cer­al, imme­di­ate, embod­ied way. 

We can’t heal what we don’t feel. While The Choice incor­po­rates my life as a psy­chol­o­gist, and allowed me to reflect on trau­ma and heal­ing through a pro­fes­sion­al as well as per­son­al lens, Bal­le­ri­na has been ther­a­peu­tic in a dif­fer­ent way, bring­ing me even clos­er to the years just before, dur­ing, and after the Holocaust. 

I also wrote Bal­le­ri­na with a greater sense of my own mor­tal­i­ty. When my sis­ter Mag­da, with whom I sur­vived Auschwitz, died (at age 100!), I real­ized that if there was any­thing else I want­ed to share with my beloved read­ers, the time was now. It felt right for me — the great-grand­moth­er, and renowned psy­chol­o­gist — to give the floor to young Edie, to say to that girl brim­ming with life and pos­si­bil­i­ty, ​“Tell me more.”

MHM: You have said that you think it is impor­tant for peo­ple to vis­it Auschwitz. Why do you feel this is impor­tant? Do you think today’s ris­ing atmos­phere of anti­semitism changes the per­spec­tive of vis­i­tors to the site?

EEE: Anti­semitism wasn’t a Nazi inven­tion. Prej­u­dice against Jews exist­ed long before Hitler, and it didn’t van­ish with the per­pe­tra­tors of geno­cide. Any­one can be taught to hate. In this age of social media influ­ence and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns, we are par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to rhetoric that exploits our fears and griev­ances, and mag­ni­fies our per­cep­tions of dif­fer­ence and divi­sion. We have to take active steps to broad­en our per­spec­tive, to see things from mul­ti­ple points of view.

We also need to be proac­tive about dis­rupt­ing stale pat­terns of think­ing and behav­ior. We tend to repeat pat­terns in our lives, even when the pat­terns may be self-destruc­tive. (This is why I ask my patients, ​“Are you evolv­ing or revolv­ing?”) If we are going to dis­rupt self-defeat­ing pat­terns, the first step is to rec­og­nize them. This is true in indi­vid­ual ther­a­peu­tic work — and it’s true for com­mu­ni­ties and soci­eties. We say,“Never again,” but these words are mean­ing­less with­out action. If we don’t want to repeat the mis­takes of the past, we have to sum­mon the courage to face what hap­pened and to choose differently. 

One of the most chill­ing things I real­ized after the war is that had I been born Ger­man and gen­tile, I would have made an ardent Hitler Youth. I was so hun­gry to belong, so ide­al­is­tic. All that human yearn­ing could eas­i­ly have been manip­u­lat­ed and har­nessed in sup­port of hate.

Vis­it­ing Auschwitz forces us into an uncom­fort­able yet vital recog­ni­tion: that could have been me. I could have been a pris­on­er — or a captor.

We’re taught to hate. We’re born to love. It’s up to each of us to reject hate and reach for our birthright: love.

MHM: How do you use your expe­ri­ences and your life sto­ry to help oth­ers process trau­ma? What makes it pos­si­ble for sur­vivors to ​“move on” and lead a pro­duc­tive life?

EEE: I learned this the hard way: There’s no free­dom in min­i­miz­ing what hap­pened, or in try­ing to forget. 

In a sense, we nev­er ​“move on” from trau­ma. The hor­ror I expe­ri­enced eighty years ago is still with me. I have night­mares and flash­backs. There are days when I feel angry, when I miss my par­ents beyond words, when I strug­gle to remem­ber that I’m safe. Yet in the ongo­ing work of com­ing to terms with what hap­pened, I’ve dis­cov­ered that Auschwitz was my great­est class­room. I found inner resources I nev­er knew I had. One of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples I use in my ther­a­peu­tic work is that our worst expe­ri­ences can also be our best teachers.

In my own heal­ing jour­ney I dis­cov­ered that the prison the Nazis put me in was much eas­i­er to escape than the men­tal prison I con­struct­ed for myself after the war. In my sec­ond book, The Gift, I exam­ine the pris­ons we make in our minds, and how to free our­selves from the self-lim­it­ing beliefs and behav­iors that keep us captive. 

Time doesn’t heal; it’s what you do with the time. Ulti­mate­ly, all ther­a­py is grief work. It’s in giv­ing up the need for a dif­fer­ent past so that we can embrace the gift of life: all that we have, and all that is possible.

MHM: What are some of the books you have read that have influ­enced and shaped your out­look on life? Are there any books you read as a young adult that have stuck with you over the years? Or, are there any books you think young adults should read?

EEE: The book that lit­er­al­ly changed my life, giv­ing me the courage and per­mis­sion to talk about my past and illu­mi­nat­ing free­dom of choice as my most essen­tial per­son­al and ther­a­peu­tic frame­work, is Vik­tor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Mean­ing. It’s bril­liant and exquis­ite — a must-read. I also high­ly rec­om­mend Erich Fromm’s Escape from Free­dom and The Art of Lov­ing, and Mar­tin Buber’s I and Thou.

As a teenag­er, I was a vora­cious read­er. I loved phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­o­gy — my high school book club read Sig­mund Freud​’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams—and I appre­ci­at­ed books, even fic­tion, that brought his­to­ry to life. It’s so essen­tial to be able to imag­ine our way into oth­ers’ expe­ri­ences. This is how we learn empa­thy and com­pas­sion, and defeat black-and-white thinking. 

Read­ing also taught me how to be com­fort­able in an inner world, a place that became my refuge in Auschwitz, a place I still vis­it for nour­ish­ment and inspiration.

To be a writer myself, and to help my read­ers cul­ti­vate their own inner worlds and resources, is a dream come true and a gift beyond compare.