The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger is a remarkable memoir from one of the remaining Holocaust survivors. At 16, she was sent to Auschwitz where her parents were killed. The ‘Angel of Death’, Nazi Officer Dr. Josef Mengele forced her to dance for his amusement- and her survival. This is the most breathtakingly beautiful account of resilience and how to move through trauma. She became an acclaimed psychologist and found out to heal and forgive, not only Hitler, but herself. 

My favorite excerpts are below:

Dr. Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind, which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he’s done. He is more a prisoner than I am. 

We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent. 

This is temporary, I’d tell myself. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. We were sent to the showers every day at Auschwitz, and every shower was fraught with uncertainty. We never knew whether water or gas would stream out of the tap.

Too accustomed to starvation rations, I am unable to waste any scrap of food. I hide the potato skin in my underwear.

This is the Death March, from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. It is the shortest distance we have been forced to walk, but we are so weakened by then that only one hundred out of the two thousand of us will survive. 

Out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war. 

From her I relearn what it is to be safe and curious. 

I didn’t get to choose! The silence in me rages. Hitler and Mengele chose for me. I didn’t get to choose. 

What was wrong with me that I was still so hungry for what wasn’t?

When you’re sensitive, you hurt more.

Fears kept hidden only grow more fierce.

This isn’t yours to carry!

If I say a word about the past, I will stoke the rage and the loss, I will fall into the dark, I will take her there with me. 

We can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life. 

I had lost my childhood to the war, my adolescence to the death camps, and my young adulthood to the compulsion to never look back. I had tried too fast and too soon to be whole. 

The flashbacks persist. I don’t have a name for these experiences, I don’t yet understand that they are a physiological manifestation of the grief that I haven’t dealt with yet. A clue my body sends as a reminder of the feelings that I have blocked from conscious life. 

You end up missing the same things that drove you crazy. It’s like she has read my mind, the little edge of doubt, the concession that maybe divorce isn’t fixing what I thought was broken.

 

There is no we until there is an I. 

Seligman’s Experiments- which were done with dogs and unfortunately preceded current protections against cruelty to animals- taught him about the concept he called “learned helplessness”. When dogs were given painful shocks were able to stop the shocks by pressing a lever, they learned quickly to stop the pain. and they were able, in subsequent experiments, to figure out how to escape painful shocks administered in a kennel cage by leaping over a small barrier. Dogs who hadn’t been given a means to stop the pain, however, had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it. When they were put in a kennel cage and administered shocks, they ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and whimpered. From this he concluded that when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering or improve our lives, we stopped taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is no point. This is what happened at the camps, when former inmates left through the gates only to return to prison, to sit vacantly, unsure what to do with their freedom now that it had finally come. Suffering is inevitable and universal. but how we respond to suffering differs. 

If I had to name my therapy-I’d probably call it Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE- Compassion, Humor, Optimism, Intuition, Curiosity, and Self-Expression.

I guide patients to understand both what causes and what maintains their self-defeating behaviors. The self-defeating behaviors first emerged as useful behaviors, things they did to satisfy a need, usually a need for one of the A’s: Approval, Affection, and Attention. 

Calamity Theory of Growth- Very often it is the crisis situation… that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result of such calamities the person often makes a major reassessment of his life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of his own capabilities, values, and goals. 

You can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present.

When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened- we grieve for what didn’t happen.

It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At work, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

Revenge doesn’t make you free.

 I don’t know that forgiving Hitler isn’t the hardest thing I’ll ever do. The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself. 

When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves.

To heal, we embrace the dark. We walk through the shadow of the valley on our way to the light. 

Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound. 

I thought of a statistic I read, that most of the members of a white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were 10 years old. These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.

 I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for- our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom- is up to us. 

(Upon returning to Auschwitz) And then I noticed it again, the thing that haunted me those hellish months when this was my home: I can’t see or hear a single bird. No birds live here. Not even now. The sky is bare of their wings, the silence deeper because of the absence of their song. 

There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory. 

I can accept the more important choice is not the one I made when I was hungry and terrified, when we were surrounded by dogs and guns and uncertainty, when I was 16; it’s the one I make now. The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect, and the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserve to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did.

 I can’t ever change the past. but there is a life I can save: it is mine.

I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. I am free. 

Our painful experiences aren’t a liability- they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to  find our unique purpose and our strength. 

It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for other’s approval. 

It isn’t over til its over. As long as you live, there’s the risk that you might suffer more. There’s also the opportunity to find a way to suffer less, to choose happiness, which requires taking responsibility for yourself. 

It’s okay to help people- and it’s okay to need help- but when your enabling allows others not to help themselves, then you’re crippling the people you want to help. 

When you lose your temper, you might feel strong in the moment, but really you are handing your power over. Strength isn’t reacting, it’s responding- feeling your feelings, thinking them over, and planning an effective action to bring you closer to your goal. 

Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe.

When did your childhood end?

When we anesthetize our feelings, with eating or alcohol or other compulsive behaviors, we just prolong our suffering. 

Do you know all that time you spent alone as a child, feeling so sad and isolated, you were building a huge store of strength and resilience? Can you applaud that little girl now?  

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. 

A child could be a rift or an opportunity in the marriage. Urge you to take good care of themselves, to let themselves rage and weep, to kick and cry and scream and get the feelings out so that they didn’t make anyone in the family pick up the tab for their grief. 

That to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now. 

My precious, you can choose to be free. 

To get a copy of this book, click HERE!

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