Auschwitz Survivor Dr. Edith Eger, Psychologist Who Healed Herself

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Auschwitz survivor Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a best-selling author and world-renowned psychologist who channeled her lifelong search for peace and healing into helping others – including other genocide survivors, victims of abuse, traumatized soldiers, and estranged families. She was 98 years old.

Dr. Eger, who was forced to dance before Dr. Josef Mengele on the night she arrived in Auschwitz and was later pulled from a pile of corpses at the end of the war. She survived and went on to lecture around the world and author three books about her experience. The Choice: Embrace the Possible (Scribner 2017), a New York Times bestseller and winner of several book-of-the-year awards, weaves together her account of surviving the Holocaust and overcoming its ghosts with the stories of those she has helped heal and who helped heal her. The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, was published in 2020, and The Ballerina of Auschwitz, published in 2024, is an adaptation of The Choice for young adults.

Dr. Eger focused on forgiving herself for surviving, and on accepting what happened to her so she could move forward.

“I forgive myself and I [don’t allow] them to take residence in body anymore. I release them,” she said of her Nazi tormentors, in a 1998 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation. “It’s not me forgiving them for what they did to me. I think it’s mostly liberating myself … to invest my energy in the future.”

Dr. Eger was a longtime friend of the USC Shoah Foundation, offering her deep insights and wisdom through panels, lectures, and films. Her story was one of seven featured in the inaugural Zikaron BaSalon/Bringing Testimony Home, which in 2021 provided kits for people and organizations to host commemorative events for Holocaust remembrance. 

In 2021, at the age of 94, Dr. Eger spent five days filming answers to thousands of questions for an interactive biography (Dimensions in Testimony). Her pre-recorded answers will enable her video image to answer real-time questions in museums and educational settings around the world.

Dr. Eger had previously recorded testimony in 1992 with The JFCS Holocaust Center in Northern California and again, in 1998, with the USC Shoah Foundation. Both interviews are contained in our collection. In all three of her testimonies, Dr. Eger filters her experience through the lens of a psychologist, offering insights into the formative experiences that shaped her response to the atrocities she confronted, and ideas about how she was able to summon the will to live.

Edith Eva Elefant was born in Košice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), on Sept. 29, 1927, the youngest of three sisters in a Reform Jewish family. Her father, Lajos, was a dress designer. Her mother, Ilona (Klein), had worked for the foreign ministry and was a gifted cook.

Dr. Eger was cross-eyed and awkward as a child, and thought of herself as the ugly duckling of her family. Her middle sister, Klara, was a violin prodigy, and her oldest sister, Magda, accompanied Klara on piano in performances around Europe. Both her sisters were beautiful.

At the age of ten, Dr. Eger underwent surgery, without anesthesia, to correct her eyes. By that time, she was an accomplished ballerina and gymnast.

“I had a very spiritual and wonderful ballet master who said to me that God built me in such a magnificent way, that whatever happens to me, I always have to find the power from within,” she said in her 1998 testimony. In late 1938, parts of Czechoslovakia, including Košice (renamed Kassa), were ceded to Hungary in the Munich Agreement, a territorial concession meant to appease Hitler and avoid war.

Dr. Eger’s life under Hungarian rule quickly changed. Her father was taken to a labor prison and her mother took in boarders in order to feed her daughters. Dr. Eger had been training in gymnastics five hours a day, but now she was told there would be no spot for her on the Hungarian national team because she was Jewish. In 1942, the Elefants’ apartment was taken over by officials of the Hungarian Nazi party and they were forced to move.

Then in March 1944 – when she was 16 and soon after her father was released from detention -- the German army marched into Košice. Within a few weeks, Dr. Eger, her parents, and her sister Magda – Klara was studying at the conservatory in Budapest – were forced from their home and held with other members of the Jewish community in a brick factory.

In May 1944, most of the Jews of Košice were loaded into putrid cattle cars and told they were going to work in Hungarian farms.

“In the cattle car, [my mother] said, ‘you know, just remember, everything can be taken away from you. Just what you put here in your head, no one can,’” Dr. Eger said.

The train arrived in Auschwitz. Men and women were separated and then Dr. Eger and Magda were separated from their mother. They were stripped and had all their hair shaved.

“And then ... I asked, when will I see my mother again? And a girl pointed at the fire on the chimney, and said, 'You can talk about your mother in past tense. She's burning there,’” Dr. Eger said.

“I was numb. I think I was void of feelings. I don't think I cried in Auschwitz,” she said.

That night, Mengele came around to the women’s barracks, looking to be entertained. Dr. Eger’s friends volunteered that she was a dancer. The inmate orchestra was already assembled outside. Mengele commanded her to dance.

The orchestra began playing Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube, a choreography she knew well. But soon, in her head, she heard different music.

“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.

When she finished dancing, Mengele tossed her a loaf of bread, which she shared with her friends.

She learned from that experience that she could find escape in her own mind.

“I created a world inside me. I remembered the spiritual ballet master — try to find it from within. And I was always thinking about the future, when all this is going to be over, and I'm going to get married. I was a 16-year-old, a hopeless romantic,” she said.

She spent six months in Auschwitz, toiling, starving, avoiding death, and looking for moments of life. She was beaten with a dog leash when she snuck out to the latrine, and she was forced to give blood several times a week to feed the German war effort.

“I said to myself, I bet with my blood you're never going to win the war,” she said, noting her pacifist nature. “I created this humorous way of getting the strength from within, so I would not give up and give in.”

In the final months of the war, she and Magda were transferred through forced labor camps and death marches. When they arrived in Mauthausen concentration camp, they saw piles of corpses, skulls, pools of blood. They were told they would be taken to the gas chambers – a fate she somehow evaded.

“I found strength in a different way. I was believing that if I surrender to the loving hands of God, and forgiving God, then my hatred will change to pity. And I began to pray for the guards, because I thought, ‘They are the prisoners. They are going to have to deal with their conscience. My conscience is clear,’” she said.

A few weeks after arriving in Mauthausen, they were again sent marching. Dr. Eger was a walking skeleton by then, her body wracked with pain. She knew if she stopped marching, she would be shot, but she could no longer drag herself forward.

Then she felt herself being lifted.

“The girls that I shared the bread with [after I danced for Mengele], they formed a chair with their arms, and they carried me.”

When American GIs liberated Gunskirchen only a few days after Dr. Eger and Magda had arrived. Dr. Eger was lying in a pile of bodies, unable to move or speak, when an American GI pulled her out and fed her a few M&Ms. GIs cared for the sisters for six weeks in an abandoned house in Wels, Austria. When they had gained some strength, the sisters undertook the journey home, through Vienna and then Prague.

In Prague, they were greeted by a poster advertising a concert with violinist Klara Elefant – their sister. They made their way to Košice and found Klara, who had been hidden by her Christian professor in Budapest. With no other surviving family members, Klara became like a mother to her two sisters.

In Košice, Dr. Eger saw a doctor who diagnosed her with a fractured back, typhoid fever, pleurisy, and pneumonia. Klara sent her to a rehabilitation hospital in the Tatra Mountains, and there Dr. Eger met Bela (Albert) Eger, the grandson of a wealthy food wholesaler from Prešov. He had fought with the partisans in the frigid mountains of Czechoslovakia and was recovering from tuberculosis. After Dr. Eger was released, they wrote letters for months. Edith and Albert were married on November 12, 1946.

The couple began rebuilding their lives in Prešov, where their daughter Marianne was born in 1947. But their stability was short-lived. In 1949, Communist authorities confiscated the family business and arrested Albert. Dr. Eger secured his release, and the young family fled first to Vienna and then to the United States.

They settled in Baltimore, and Dr. Eger worked in a clothing factory while her husband studied to be an accountant. The family later moved to El Paso, where they welcomed two more children, Audrey and John (known as Johnny), and where she began the long process of reinventing herself. Though determined for years to bury her past, she later said she had tried to become a “Yankee Doodle dandy,” avoiding discussion of the war even with her children.

That changed when a classmate shared “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Austrian Holocaust survivor and renowned psychotherapist, Viktor Frankl. Upon reading it, she realized how much energy she was expending on not facing her past. She struck up a correspondence and then a friendship with Frankl.

Dr. Eger earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1969 and her PhD in psychology in 1978, writing a thesis on how some children who experience trauma grow up to thrive. She saw herself in the people she studied and treated.

“I was able to interview people who not only survived and function on an average, but on an above-average level ... survivors who were able to somehow turn that tragedy into inner strength,” she said.

She worked at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center in Fort Bliss, Texas, and in 1980, she was invited to deliver the keynote address at a conference for 600 military chaplains held in Berchtesgaden, Germany – the former site of an SS retreat. After the conference, she made an on-the-spot decision to visit Auschwitz.

“I wasn't free until I returned to the lion’s den and looked the lion in the face,” she said in her testimony. “I reclaimed my innocence and I assigned the shame and guilt to the perpetrators.”

Dr. Eger moved to La Jolla, California, and set up a private practice. She served on the faculty of UC San Diego and continued consulting for the military and lecturing around the world about psychology and her experiences. She worked well into her 90s, giving TED Talks, publishing articles in The Atlantic, and gaining a following on social media. Both her best-selling books were published after her 90th birthday.

“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. 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.”

May her memory be a blessing.