Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger, who dedicated her life to helping people overcome mental struggles through psychology, died this month in San Diego at 98.
Born in Košice, Czechoslovakia (present-day Slovakia) in 1927 to Leopold and Helena Elefant, Eger was the youngest of three sisters. She trained in ballet and gymnastics as a child, even making the country’s Olympic team in the latter. When world powers ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany in the 1938 Munich agreement, authorities sent Leopold to a labor camp, and Eger was kicked off the national team due to her Jewish background.
In 1944, German troops entered Košice, and within weeks, Eger’s family, except for her sister Klara, who was studying in Budapest, was forced to move to the city’s ghetto. Only months later, the authorities loaded the Jews of the ghetto onto cattle cars and transported them to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival and selection, Eger was separated from her mother and father, whom infamous Auschwitz physician Dr. Josef Mengele sent to their immediate deaths in the gas chambers. Eger would later recall how the “Angel of Death” forced her to dance for him to the tune of “The Blue Danube,” leading to her survival.
“As I was dancing, I closed my eyes and took myself away from Auschwitz, and to the Budapest Opera House, and the music was Tchaikovsky, and I was dancing Romeo and Juliet,” she said to the USC Shoah Foundation. After dancing, she received a loaf of bread, which she shared with her fellow prisoners.
As the allies closed in on Germany’s territory towards the end of World War II, Eger’s captors forced her on a death march of over 50 kilometers to the Gunskirchen concentration camp, together with her sister Magda and other prisoners. When US troops liberated the camp in May 1945, Eger weighed only 32 kilograms.
Recovering with the help of American troops, Eger and Magda started the journey home, stopping in Prague, where they found their older sister Klara alive. Back in Košice, a doctor diagnosed Eger with a fractured back, typhoid fever, pleurisy, and pneumonia.
Eger made a name for herself in psychology
At a hospital in the Tatra mountains, she met partisan fighter Albert Eger, whom she married in 1946. In 1949, the communist government arrested Albert, and after his release, the couple and their young daughter emigrated to Texas.
Inspired by the famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Eger began studying psychology and, in 1978, was awarded a doctorate in the field, opening a clinic and working at the University of California, San Diego. Lecturing, publishing articles, and more, Eger published two books in her lifetime, both in her 90s.
Eger only returned to Auschwitz in 1980 by chance, speaking at a military event nearby and deciding to visit the site of the extermination camp afterward.
“I wasn't free until I returned to the lion’s den and looked the lion in the face,” Eger told the foundation. “I reclaimed my innocence, and I assigned the shame and guilt to the perpetrators.”
“I don’t have time to hate. I don’t forget what happened to me. I may not overcome it – I think I came to terms with it, and I was able to integrate it. Took me 40 years, and I’m still not done,” she said in her 1998 interview.
“But I don’t live in Auschwitz," said Eger. "Part of me was left in Auschwitz, but not the better part. Not the bigger part. I think I’m capable of having joy and passion and living a full life.”