Life after an injury

"Choice" Edith Eve Eger: A book for weekends from Ekaterina Pisareva

From the editorial office

Once a week on Fridays, Ekaterina Pisareva, the chief editor of the MyBook book service, including 260 thousand publications and 50 thousand audiobooks, will know with knowledge not only about the most interesting new products in 2020, but also choose those that can be read quickly and with pleasure.

What is it like to survive in hell and maintain sanity? Dr. Edith Eger is now 93 years old, and she knows about the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand: in 1944, sixteen -year -old ballerina Edith, along with her family, fell into Auschwitz (aka Auschwitz). Her parents died in a gas chamber, and Edith and her sister Magda went through all the trials and selection, visited Mauthausen and Gunskirhen, but got out of the death camps alive.

Now Edith Eger is conducting clinical practice, teaching at the faculty of psychology at the University of California at San Diego and helps soldiers, war veterans and victims to cope with their past. “Choice” (translation from English by Tatyana Lukonina and Daria Smirnova, Publishing House “Myth”) - her first book, her Magnum Opus, written at 90 years old. This is not just memoirs of surviving in the Holocaust - it is a manifesto of liberation from his inner prison.

Her story is a confession of a man who learned to live anew after his fate was broken, deprived of his youth and vocation.

Edith was not always wise and courageous, but each time, being faced with death, she intuitively chose life. On her first night in Aushwitz, Edith danced in front of Dr. Mengel, the famous death angel - a merciless killer and connoisseur of arts. This episode is one of the most deafening in the book.

“Paul Barack becomes the scene of the Hungarian opera Theater,” recalls Eger. - I dance for my fans sitting in the hall. I dance in the bright light of burning sophists. For my beloved Romeo, who lifts me high above the stage. I dance for the sake of love. I dance to live. "

Edith remembered the words of her mother before her arrest: "No one would take what you have in your head." They helped her escape.

In the death camp, Edith and her sister Magde had a hard time: hunger, humiliation, illness, constant balancing on the verge - all this injured, left a bloody imprint in their memory. But Edith was able to reconcile with the past and learn useful experience from him. For many years she was looking for the answer to the question "Why did I survive?" “And I was able to find him.”

It is pointless to evaluate the literary virtues of this book, it has completely different tasks. This is a book with a therapeutic effect - it helps desperate to find calm, and embittered - forgive the offenders. Dr. Eger shows on his own example that there are no hopeless situations. She says that a person always has a choice: to blame himself for what happened, or to accept his past and live on.

In addition to the personal history of survival, the book also has examples from the medical practice of Dr. Eger. Her patients are very different people, but always with complex fates. Sometimes they turn to her only in extreme cases - when other psychologists give up. For example, Eger gives the book the story of a girl who survived violence and the army captain, who came to her reception with a charged gun. Dr. Eger found a special approach to each patient-she did not devalue their personal experience, but carefully analyzed this or that story and showed that one could treat the situation differently.

The main thing that Eger teaches is not to become embittered, but to accept any test as an invaluable gift that will help to become better and more conscious.

Edith Eger has repeatedly called “surviving Anna Frank” because both of them grew up in similar families, received the same education and got to the death camp at the same age. But unlike Anna, Edith survived and told what it was like to meet daily face to face with death and people who embodied this death. She refuses victimization, she wants to win. And first of all, the very itself, his fears. Therefore, the “choice” of Eger is closer, of course, not to the “diary” of Anna Frank, but to another work on the Holocaust - the book of psychiatrist Victor Frankl “Man in search of meaning”. Eger recalls how Frankl has influenced her in “choosing”: “... His book gave me a verbal ability to share his secret, his letters were opened to me that he no longer needed to run, his wise tips helped me understand not only what I survived, but also how I could help survive others.”

More than once, Eger characterizes his book as "Women's voice telling what Frankl wrote." The general past rallied them - Eger and Frankl not only wrote memoirs about the experience and began to help other people, but also became colleagues and friends.

Today, when the soul and in the world is especially alarming, Edith Eger is saving - it gives hope. This is not so much the clinician memoirs as the simple and ingenuous story of a friend, drawing inspiration from a well of memory. Eger holds out a helping hand to the reader, offering to make a choice: to lock himself in an internal prison or to open his heart to the world and start living recklessly - here and now.

Sending 📨
Want to receive a “weekend” section by e -mail? Leave the address here. We will send letters on Saturday morning.