A Holocaust Survivor's Story

four years old. She's a psychologist who specializes in post traumatic stress disorder and is the author of the book The Choice, in which she describes how learning to control her own mind helped her to survive the Holocaust. Edith had been taught that lesson as a young child when she was training to be a dancer, but she hadn't understood its meaning at the time. You know, my mother took me to a ballet school and my ballet master told me one day that ecstasy comes from inside out.

And I had no idea what he was talking about. But you know, in Auschwitz, it came to me when nothing came from the outside. I still had my spirit that no nuts she could take away. On today's episode, we hear from doctor Edith Eager, ninety four year old Holocaust survivor. I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. An estimated six million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust.

More than half were murdered in concentration camps. The largest and deadliest concentration camp was Auschwitz in Nazi occupied Poland. More than a million Jewish people were killed there, many of them sent directly to the gas chambers when they arrived by train. Doctor Edith Eager is here today to share her story of surviving Auschwitz. It was spring of nineteen forty four when the Nazis came for Edith and her family. Edith was sixteen and living with her parents

in Budapesh. Her oldest sister, Clara was off studying piano in the city, but in the rest of her family, her older sister Mada, and her mom and her dad were home for state or dinner. After dinner, my father got up and kissed us on our heads and we went to sleep, and a couple hours later, big banging on the door to get ready, to get ready, to quickly, quickly, quickly. It was Nazi soldiers who were showing up. What happened next when they came in The Hungarian Nazis were terrible, terrible,

so there was not a kind word or anything. You become like someone who's done something bad. It didn't matter what you said. It was no way out at that point. It was too late. We were taken into a big factory and from there to a train station to Oushwitz, and we had to leave everything behind. I have a picture of the dress that I wore, and was a beautiful dress, and I wore it also a lot when

I was with my boyfriend. Wow. When you and your parents and your sister Mata are put in a cattle car and unbeknownst to you are heading to Auschwitz, your mom tells you something on that ride that really sticks with you. Do you mind sharing what she told you? My mom looked at me and hugged me, and she said, we don't know where be going, we don't know what's going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind,

and that's exactly what happened. Everything was taken away from me. When you arrive at Auschwitz, you are separated into two lines, right, so everyone between ages fourteen and forty are put in one line and everyone else is put into another. And an officer named doctor Joseph Mangela, the infamous Nazi officer known as the Angel of Death, ask you whether your mom is in fact your mom or whether she's your sister, and instinctively you answer with the truth, which is that

she is your mom. What happens next? What happens after you tell him that she's your mom? He pointed my mother to go that way, and my sister ride this way, and I began to walk behind my mother. He came and grabbed me. Never before, I never forget those eyes, and he said, you're gonna see your mother very soon. She's just gonna take a shower. M Later on, you engage with a couple a fellow prisoner who supervises other prisoners, and you ask her when will I see my mother again?

I was told I would see her soon, and that's when she she delivers this devastating news to you. I said, well, I want to know, Ben, will I meet my mother? And she pointed the chimney and she said, she's burning dead. She said, you better talk about her in past tense. She used that kind of a language. Everybody over forty, everybody under fourteen, they're never given a chance, maybe taken to the chamber and mass. Sister and Magda hugged me

and said, despit it never dies. That's obviously such a powerful thing to tell you in a moment of acute shock and trauma and grief. And then to pile on top of all of that, you have to see your parents killer again. That night, you see Joseph Mangela again.

That night he asks you to dance for him as a form of entertainment in the barracks, and you have this realization for the first time that while your physical freedom has been entirely stripped from you, you still have control over some of the mental choices that you make. That you can reframe this dance in a way that nourishes you and helps bring you some kind of sustenance in that moment. Can you share more about how you

reframed that dance, what you visualized. I closed my eyes and I imagined that the music was Tchaikovsky, and I was dancing the Rome and Juliet at these That's how I think it's very important to think about you're thinking, because whatever you think, you create. The feeling comes from your thoughts. There's there's this moment of generosity that you display where Mangela offers you bread after your dance and you end up sharing it with the girls that are

around you, right you know. I looked at there and and I wanted to garbble it up. And then I looked up and I said to myself, no way, and I shared the bread. It was one foot one head, one foot one head. That's how we slept. There were very little spaces between us, so we really had to cooperate, not complete. And when I danced and I got that piece of bread, it was the best thing that I remember that I did with a little piece of bread

that six of us were enjoying. There's this really beautiful moment you share at Magda where that exceptional quality comes out and you Edith where where again you realize that you have control over your mind. And so your sister, who had for so long prided herself on being the beauty in your family comes to you. She has just had her head shaven by the Nazis, and she asked you how she looks. I realized then as you realize

now too. I'm sure that I could point out what she lost or pay attention to what she still had left. So instead of telling her how she lived in her nakedness, I said, Magda, you have beautiful eyes, and I didn't see it when you had your hair all over her place, as she said, thank you. Wow, that is so moving. You gotta change your thinking and look at the problem as a challenge and look at the crisis as a transition. I think it's very important to think a boy you're thinking.

Towards the end of the war, the Nazis forced the prisoners at your camp to relocate to another camp in what became known as the Death March from Auschwitz, and you had to walk over thirty four miles. So many people died from weakness and illness along the way, and officers were known to shoot at anybody who lagged behind, anyone who fall behind, And at one point edith you found yourself unable to keep walking due to extreme exhaustion. You saw the kindness you had paid to others paid

back to you during this experience. Right you had shared the small piece of bread that you were given with the other girls, and in turn, when you were walking what you believe would be your last steps, they used their arms to create this chair for you and help you continue forward, help you survive. Thank god I did, because when I was in a dead march, when you stopped, you were shot, and when a ghost so saw me

just I was so tired. And this is you know, when when I thought I'm really going to die, I didn't think I can walk anymore, and they came and they carried me. Imagine how the worst condition brings out the bestiness. I wouldn't have made it if I would have garbled up that bread that giving is getting. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Doctor Edith Eager was just sixteen years old when she was put on a train to Auschwitz. She spent a

total of eight months in Nazi concentration camps. After enduring what is known as the death March from Auschwitz to Austria, Edith was on the brink of death herself, but then on May fourth, nineteen forty five troops from the US Army's seventy first Infantry came in and liberated the people at the camp. An American soldier found Edith lying among the dead. He noticed her hand moving slightly. She was in terrible condition. She had typhoid, fever, pneumonia, and a

broken back. The soldier called for medical help and brought Edith to safety. For the entire of her time in the concentration camps, Edith had been holding out some small hope that her parents and boyfriend might still be alive, but after she was rescued, she learned that the Nazis had murdered all of them. One thing I so appreciate about how you share your story, Edith, is that you refuse to make a clean delineation between imprisonment and liberation.

I hope you don't mind my quoting you. You said I thought my freedom would begin the moment the war ended and the death camps were liberated. I didn't know that the worst prison was not the one the Nazis put me in, but the one I built for myself in the decades after the war, when I chose to stay a hostage of the past, stuck in a mental

prison of secrets, survivor's guilt, and self limiting beliefs. You mentioned that you didn't feel suicidal when you were in the concentration camp, but it was upon release that that's when you encountered this profound depression. What was the difference? Because my parents didn't come home while I was in a camp. I could imagine the beautiful meeting with my

parents with my boyfriend. None of that came true, and I had nothing to live for, no meaning, no perfect nothing, And I talked about that existential vacuum that you don't have anything to get up for. So we agree, well, we're not what happened, But what didn't happen? When my granddaughter wanted to go to her dance at the school and asked me to buy a pretty dress. I did a beautiful dress, and I came home and out of the blue, I was crying. I didn't get it was

the matter with me? What am I crying about? I just bought Lindsey a dress so she can go to her dance. And then I realized that I didn't cry because of that. I cried because I never went to a dance. And that's what grief is. All about not what happened, but what did happen. I will never forget Auschwitz. I don't overcome it. I don't know that word at all, but I call it my cherished wound. And I have a special place in my heart, specially for my boyfriend

who was killed a day before liberation. So not to run away from the past, and not to run away from crying, because then you cry, you get rid of something that vehicle fully say, oh I had a good

cry and I feel better. Yeah. One thing that I think will be so important for people to hear from you is in your book you mentioned one thing you can't change is the past, and there has to be an acceptance around that, and you talk about how you were plagued by guilt for so many years around that answer you gave to Joseph mangela right, why didn't I tell him that my mom was my sister that plagued you for so long, even though Edith you were a child. You know what, how are you supposed to know what

the outcome was going to be? But it is not uncommon for people to wrongly blame themselves for what happens, and so I would love to hear about how you found accepted in that and how you came to how you found peace in what happened. I think there is one very short sentence that if I knew then, I would have done things differently. If you knew then what you know now, it would have been a very different picture.

My parents had tickets to go to America and they never used it, and that's why I think they would help everybody. Just one sentence and forgive yourself. So I like to live in a present. The question is not why me? The question is what now? Because the past is gone and the future is not yet. Wow. You ended up moving to the US and trained to become a psychotherapist, doctor Edith. Your life's work has been to help people who have had trauma quote escape the concentration

camp of their own minds. That's how you've talked about your work. And what's interesting is that you've said it actually took you years to finally free yourself. Right, You were freeing all of these people through your clinical practice, but to do that for yourself took more time and more work. What was that process? Like? I was talking to paraplegics and one of them was why me? And

terribly angry and blaming and blaming God's country. And conversely, I say that that there was another guy with the same symptomatology, same diagnosis, same prognosis, and told me, hey, hey, doc, I'm in a wheelchair and I can see my children's eyes much closer. And I was given a second chance and life. And I feel lie and impastor and I'm wearing a white coat and it says doctor Eager, Department

of Psychiatry. I went to school, and I went to school, and I went to school, and that's when I decided I must go back to our streets. I revisited that place, and I started to cry buckets that I'm here looking at it rather than being in the ditch where I would have been in no time at all. I think it's very important to make peace the past, not to run from it or fight it, and not to try to forget it, because that's when I learned that life is from inside out. It's up to me what I

do with the external circumstance. So it's very important not to run away from the past the way I did. I didn't tell anyone I was in Auschwitz close to twenty years If you ask me who I was, I would say, who do you want me to be? You'll become a very, very talented schizophrenic. It must have been so painful for you to return to the place where you experience the most profound trauma a human can experience in their life. When I went back to our Shwitz for a moment, I tooed I so Anazi, it was

a person in uniform. But when I realized that I have an passport in my pocket and that time free, and I was so glad that I was able to go back to Auschwitz and go back to the lions then and look at that lion and tell them that I'm gonna take my freedom, and I'm gonna stop blaming myself.

And I've stopped running around with survivors. Geared that even when I was graduating kum Loud there, I didn't show up for my graduation because I had so much survivor's guard that I didn't deserve it because they were And that's a whole new interview you and I can talk on, is how you deny your successes and that gave yourself permission, give yourself permission to go through the age. There is

no forgiveness without going true that age. And it's hard for me to articulate this, I guess, so I'll try. I'll just try my best. But as a sixteen year old, you somehow had the cognitive wherewithal to identify moments, however small, in your experience, in outfits where you could control your own mind, where you took power away from the Nazis and gave that power to yourself. And I wonder, how did that just come naturally to you? Did you feel

it was an intentional act on your part? And I asked this, Edith, because your mind is so remarkable and unusual in nature, and I'm trying to figure out if we can even relate to you. I've read your work, and I know you mentioned that your sister Magda doesn't share the same instincts as you. Right, she would fantasize, I think, so understandably about getting revenge on the Nazis and murdering the Nazis. And I think probably more people can relate to her point of view than yours, because

yours is so exceptional. And I want to know for those listening who want to cultivate a doctor Edith mindset is our way for us to cultivate it. I decided that they are the prisoners, not me. So I turned hatred it to pity that they be bearing at uniform and they murdering children, and so does hate return to be pity. I ended up praying for them in my own way, um that that that they are really the true prisoners, not me. Forgiveness is a gift that I

give myself that I don't carry. Then arswer with me that I don't carry the hatred me. That is really not going to empower me. It's going to deplete me. And I and I don't want to give another inch. And I want to live a full life. I want to have love and faith and I and I want to have passion for life. I'm wondering, how would you capture the biggest way in which you changed through this experience,

ah All. I can tell you that I live in a present, and I stay away from why questions because why it requires that, because and that requires to really know all the reasons why you are the way you are. So I live today, yesterday, he's gone. Tomorrow is not yet as I told you, and I am in the process of discovery, not recovery, but discovery. The discovery apparts in me that doesn't hold on to the past, that does not ever falls into the victim's mentality. I was victimized.

It's not my it's not my personality, it's not who I am. And I think that's why I'm so happy that my book is gonna be in my grand great grand children's living room. I have seven of those, and I think that I can be a good roma to everyone to write that book. Edith, your book is going to be in my great grandchildren's living room. It's going to be in all of our living rooms. It is an unbelievable work of art and humanity and science. And wow, a lot of tears every page, a lot of tears.

And I think crying is very good as long as it doesn't take you away from the present, because that's the only thing you can change. Thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when I talk to doctor Eelat fish Bach, a professor of psychology an expert in the science of motivation. She'll teach us how to set smarter goals for ourselves and give us science based strategies to help us reach them. A slight change of plans is

created written an executive produce by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Emily Rosteck our producer and fact checker, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Holiday our sound engineer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a

production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicolemrano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Fame and Carly Niggliori, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at your Maya Sugar. I hope you'll do that someday that we can exchange philosophies and do a semin up together. Oh that would be a dream for me and it was such an honor. I look forward to staying in touch.

Me too, me too, me too, Please do that definitely. I love you, I love you too, Eadie