The Biggest Prison Is in Your Mind
What we can all learn from the life of Dr. Edith Eger, holocaust survivor
“We have the opportunity to gain control over our lives. The choice is ours.”- states Edith Eva Eger (everybody calls her Edie), the reputed Hungarian-American psychologist and Holocaust survivor in her international bestseller, “The Choice”, which she wrote at 90.
It is a must-read for everybody who loses control over his life and struggles to find a way out of disillusionment. She teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the prison of our minds and live the life we want because everything depends on us.
It was a long way for Edith Eva Eger to find her integrity, cope with the past and overcome the common mental illness of Holocaust survivors, the post-traumatic stress disorder.
Each of Edith’s life sections reveals powerful lessons that everybody can adapt to his life.
The road to Auschwitz from Hungary
Edith Eva Eger was born in Kassa, part of Czechoslovakia when she was born but belonged to Hungary when she was deported to Auschwitz. She had two elder sisters: Magda and Klara. All of them were gifted children. Magda was a pianist, while Klara was admitted to the Conservatory of Budapest as the only Jew to become a violinist, and Edith was a member of the Hungarian Olympic gymnastics team.
Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. Almost half a million Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps within a few months.
It was not something unexpected. The first antisemitic laws that restricted the rights of Jews were introduced at the end of the 1930s. First, they cut the number of Jews in the companies, the press, among physicians, engineers, and lawyers by 80%. Then they declared the Jews a racial community instead of a religious minority. Intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews were prohibited. Jews were excluded from government jobs. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their incomes and even their rights to vote by the new laws.
The deportation of the Hungarian Jews was meant to fulfill the Nazi mission to sweep out the Jewish race.
Edith was also excluded from the national gymnastics team because of her origins.
“Edith. This isn’t my choice. But I must be the one to tell you that your place on the Olympic training team will go to someone else. The simple truth is that because of your background, you are no longer qualified.” — told her trainer.
When the antisemitic environment became suffocating, emigration seemed the only solution for many who had connections. Edith’s family was offered flight tickets to America, but her father turned them down. Her mother also refused fake papers offered by a Hungarian official urging them to flee. But they turned them down. The children learned later that both their parents could have made a different choice.
Fight for survival in the death camps
Edith and Magda were immediately separated from their parents after arriving in the deadliest concentration camp in Auschwitz. When Edith was desperately searching for their mother, someone pointed to the chimney emitting smoke in the distance:
“Your mother is burning in there”.
This is when her fight for survival became clear and irrevocable.
“If I survive today, then tomorrow I will be free. If I survive today, then tomorrow I will be free.” — she kept on repeating. Despite being told continuously that she would not survive, she stayed curious about what would happen the very next day.
In Auschwitz, she met Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death”, who played a major part in the mass execution of Jews in gas chambers.
“I can hear his voice over the music. He discusses with the other officer which ones of the hundred girls present will be killed next. If I miss a step, if I do anything to displease him, it could be me. I dance. I dance. I am dancing in hell.” — remembers Edith as she was selected to dance for Mengele to stay alive on the day when her mother was burnt in the gas chamber. She got a loaf of bread for her performance that night that she shared with the others.
The inspectors stared at the prisoners with such disgust that they felt entirely annihilated.
“Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your own mind.” — recalls Edie her mother’s words.
They woke up at 4 am every morning and lined up in the freezing cold and dark before starting their daily labor. They were sent to the showers every day at Auschwitz but never knew whether water or gas would stream out of the tap.
Everybody was close to starving, and a piece of bread could decide who would stay alive. Edith hid the potato peels in her underwear.
Later, the sisters were made to march to other concentration camps with equally harsh conditions.
Finally, American soldiers discovered them under a pile of dead bodies in a terrible state of health. They recovered in a military hospital and returned home to unite with their sister, Klara, who managed to hide and avoid deportation.
Lessons:
- “No one can take from you what you have put in your mind.”
- “The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem — and the foundation of our persistent suffering — is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.”
- “Freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next.”
Liberation: life after the death camp
Out of the 15 000 deportees from here city, only 70 survived. She and her sister were one of them.
They survived but carried a heavy weight that they were unaware of. The struggle to find happiness and meaning in life posed an enormous challenge in Edith’s life. She married the Jewish Bela Eger and gave birth at a young age. Then they escaped to the United States and restarted their lives from scratch. Like most Holocaust survivors, they lived under harsh conditions, took small jobs, and lived a life of toil. Soon her husband built up a career as a Certified Public Accountant, and they established a financially comfortable life in California.
They never talked about the Holocaust to their children because they wanted to forget the horror of the past. Edith even divorced her husband at a point, believing he was responsible for her unhappiness.
This is when she followed her instincts and found a purpose in her life apart from being a mother.
Edith was 42 when she received her degree in Psychology in 1969. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1978. She worked harder than anybody and became an expert on post-traumatic disorder.
However, Edith realized that escaping Auschwitz did not help her get over the trauma. It was not the relationship with her husband that set back her life. She had to change and face the prison in her mind.
“The worst prison is not the one the Nazis put me in. The worst prison is the one I built for myself.”
Edie once got a weird invitation to address 600 Army Chaplains at a clinical pastoral retreat in the General Walker Hotel in the mountains of Bavaria, which had served as a guesthouse and meeting place for Hitler’s SS officers. Here Adolf Eichmann presented the “Final Solution”, the extermination of the Jewish race.
Despite her surroundings trying to dissuade her, she stayed firm in her belief that the only way to find her genuine self was to face the truth and her biggest fear. So, she accepted the invitation.
They got the room in a nearby hotel where Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister also stayed. The Berghof (Eagle’s Nest), Hitler’s former residence, was only a short walk away.
Lessons:
- “The worst prison is that we build in our minds.”
- “Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful — I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control.”
- “Freedom is about Choice. And to be free is to live in the present. If we are stuck in the past, we are living in a prison of our own making. Likewise, if we spend our time in the future. The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.”
- “We should never try to hide our truth. When we force our truths and stories into hiding, secrets can become their own trauma, their own prison.”
Summary
We often struggle and get uncertain about living to the fullest and being in complete harmony with our bodies, thoughts, and values. The reason for not living our genuine life is the prison we put in our minds. It is important to face our fears and not be paralyzed by them.
Freedom is the choice to take control of our lives and learn to be ourselves. When we refuse to take responsibility, we give up on life. Freedom comes with taking risks that are necessary for self-realization.
Stop judging yourself for your past; accept and love yourself with your failures. Accept that struggle is temporary, and the only thing nobody can take from you is what is in your brain.
The 94-year-old woman is in enviable health and uses every moment to help people. She gets countless invitations to speaking engagements, was a guest of Oprah Winfrey, and was featured on CNN.
Apart from having her patients, she accepts television groups and gives interviews regularly.
Edith Eger remains a source of inspiration for many and endlessly works to heal others.
“The meaning in life is when you can be useful. The only way I think I survived is that I can serve others.”
Thank you for reading!
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