The Choice That Kept Dr. Edith Eger Alive In Auschwitz

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Hey there, just a heads up, I'm going to be on tour this summer and fall. You can come see me in San Francisco and Portland in June. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October. In August, I'm mixing my months up here. But in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that dailystoiclive.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I remember this was six years ago, seven years ago. I don't remember exactly, but I was talking to Dr.

0:55Ryan Holiday: Chatterjee and he was telling me about this incredible woman that he'd met, Dr. Edith Eager. She was a Holocaust survivor, a student of Viktor Frankl's. She'd survived Auschwitz. And what she loved to do, he said, was dance, that she'd sort of danced through life, that she'd endured these terrible things. And yet she said it sort of came down to a choice, a choice actually very similar to the choice that the Stoics talked about, which is like, how are you going to respond to these things? What are you going to do about them? Who are you going to be in the face of them?

1:38Ryan Holiday: Edith Eger, your audience probably know who she is. Edith, when she was 16 years old, growing up in Eastern Europe, she was going for a date with her boyfriend that night. She was trying to think about what dress is she going to wear. And her family get a knock on the door. her sister, her and her two parents get put on a train to Auschwitz. Within two hours of getting there, both of her parents are murdered. An hour or two later, she is a 16 year old girl, gets asked to dance for the senior prison guards. There's many things from that conversation that have never left me, Ryan. She said, the final thing my mother said to me, Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your own mind.

2:12Ryan Holiday: And then she says, when I was dancing in Auschwitz. I wasn't in Auschwitz. In my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House. I had a beautiful dress on. The orchestra was playing. The crowd were cheering. Then she tells me I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. They weren't free in their mind. I was. She said to me, Rangan, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison is the prison you create inside your own minds.

2:42Ryan Holiday: I got to meet Dr. Eager. I guess she was in her early 90s when we met and talked. And sadly, she just passed away a few days ago, earlier this week, at the age of 98. Just an incredible life, an incredible woman who taught me a lot in the handful of conversations that we had. And so in today's episode, I want to share some lessons from her that I hope will stay with you the way that they've stayed with me. In one of the interviews, you'll hear her daughter talking. One of the episodes they recorded together, I thought it was really interesting to hear her perspective. Dr. Eger was a teenager in Hungary.

3:20Ryan Holiday: She was set to Auschwitz with her family. 1944, her parents were killed in gas chambers. but it was her courage that kept her and her sister alive. She went on to become a psychologist. She specialized in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. And she wrote this beautiful memoir called The Choice, along with two other books, The Gift and The Ballerina of Auschwitz. I spoke with her twice on the Daily Stoic podcast, and then we did a live webinar together as well. Let me bring you some chunks of that here. What you talk about in The Choice is really thinking about what you're thinking, that even something as terrible as Auschwitz, you have the ability to determine what you think about it.

4:03Ryan Holiday: You might be powerless in that you're there, but you can decide what it means to you. It is very important for me to tell you that I found love and God in Auschwitz because I was able to look at the guards, that they were more in prison than I was, that they were brainwashed. They were brainwashed to look at me and calling me cancer to society. And I was told in Auschwitz, I'm never going to get out of here alive. And I was able to turn hate to pity and feeling sorry for the guards that they would have a conscience and they would have to pay for what they're doing now, putting children into the oven without even gassing them.

4:54Ryan Holiday: But that doesn't come naturally, right? You have to really work to get yourself there, or is that how your disposition just is? I think I wanted to live so badly. I was in love, you see? And he told me I have beautiful eyes. In the kettlebell car, my mom told me, and I quote that all the time when I go to school, my mom told me, we don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. And just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind. I had to learn is what my belief master told me, that look at God from inside out. And I learned to change my thinking and never even imagine that I am not going to get out of here.

5:50When I get out of fear, I'm going to see my boyfriend. When I get out of fear, I'll show him my eyes. When I get out of fear, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow is where I was always. Tomorrow was really, truly a wonderful friend to me.

6:09Ryan Holiday: Are you familiar with James Stockdale, the prisoner of war in Vietnam? Maybe not. Yeah, he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and he studied stoicism. And so he was thinking of the work of Epictetus there as he was being tortured. And I'd be curious what your take on this is, because what he was saying, and obviously not having experienced it, I have no idea, but he was saying that there's this tension because he said the optimists were the ones that didn't make it out. because the optimist always thought, I'm going to be home by Christmas. I'm going to be home by summer. And it never happened. So he said, you can't be an optimist.

6:49Ryan Holiday: You have to be a realist. But at the same time, you have to have this unflinching belief that you are going to survive. And if you do, you will turn this into the best thing that ever happened to you. You can't heal what you don't feel. So don't medicate, don't medicate, grieve. I also worked with a wonderful girl from Yugoslavia. Together, we were keeping each other alive, but she told me that we're going to be liberated by Christmas. And Christmas came, and she died the next day. That kind of rigid thinking, all or nothing, didn't work at all. But I knew who was going to die. I had this ability to look at the eyes, to look at the face of people who just gradually gave up.

7:46Or they even touched the wire and they got electrocuted. Or they touched the guard and they were shocked. You know, they took my blood. And one time they asked me about getting my arm so they can take my blood. And I asked, why are you taking my blood? And he said, to aid the German soldiers. I spoke German fluently. And to aid the Germans so we can win the war and take over the world, especially America. So I couldn't yank my arm away. But you know what? I said to myself, you are the stupidest. because I was a ballerina. And so I never allowed them to get to me. And people say, you make me angry.

8:43Nobody makes me angry. People have as much anger or whatever, any feelings. I do not allow people to ever murder my spirit.

8:54Ryan Holiday: My wife says that. She says, I've said, you know, you're frustrating me. And she said, I can't make you frustrated. That's all on you. I have an anxiety, and no, you don't. You're thinking anxiously, and yet, yes, Epictetus was certainly right. That is not what's happening. It's what you do with it. Yeah, Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, he writes, Today I escaped anxiety. And he says, No, I discarded it because it was inside me. I let it go. And I think that's a beautiful way to say it. So when I say that revenge gives you very temporary satisfaction, but forgiveness is the freedom, is the gift that I choose to give to myself.

9:43And I think that is a big, big difference that I am not a victim. I was not at all, ever at here to be a victim. I was victimized. It's not who I am. It's not my identity. It's what was done to me. And I think there is a big difference. I refuse to be a victim. It's not who I am. It's not my identity.

10:10Ryan Holiday: So when you come out of Auschwitz and you go back to your life and then your life is disrupted again by the sort of tyranny of communism, I'm just curious, how do you not carry resentment or anger, not just at the perpetrators, but at the bystanders or the indifferent population that allowed something like this to happen. I guess that's what I'm struggling with. Yeah, I think, you know, there is no forgiveness without rage. You got to go through the valley of the shadow of death, but don't get stuck in that. Some people are chronically angry because the anger somehow keeps them from really facing and go through that pain, but not to get stuck in there, not to be a victim.

11:03So you're in a dark tunnel, but you're going towards the light that you have to have an arrow that you follow. It's very, very important not to run from the past or forget it or fight it, but recognize no matter what happened, I made it. I was very suicidal after I was liberated. I was lying in a cast. I could hardly breathe. And I realized the parents are not coming back. My boyfriend was killed a day before liberation. It's important to be realistic rather than idealistic. Because when the idealist doesn't get what they're looking for, they can become very sarcastic, very cynical. The Hungarians can be very cynical, very sarcastic.

11:59I like philosophical humor, not sarcasm or cynicism.

12:05Ryan Holiday: Yeah, General Mattis says that cynicism is cowardice, which I think is a beautiful way of expressing it. It's a mechanism to hide from life. Yeah, very well said. So you read a lot of books, the books that you carry. Yes. That's beautiful. That's lovely. You really are maybe wondering, well, what is my truth? My grandmother gave me a copy of Viktor Frankl's A Man's Search for Meaning as a young man. And that book opened my eyes as it did for you. And I'm just curious about what your experiences with him were like. My experience with him was wonderful. I can tell you that Viktor Funko has a great deal to do with where I am today, with me and my voice, that he guided me to go back to that lion's den and look at the lion in a face.

13:05and reclaim my innocence. So when I went back and I was ready to come out, I saw a man with a uniform. And for a moment I thought, I'm in a camp with a Nazi. And the realization that I had a blue American passport in my pocket, that was an amazing experience that I'm not Popeye. I am me, and it's okay to speak English with an accent, and I don't have to give up my true self for some kind of a formula that actually was the best thing I ever done. And that's what I do in my work now. You revisit the places where you've been. We go through the grieving, feeling, and healing. You cannot heal what you don't feel.

14:04Ryan Holiday: How does that work? Because today it seems like there's a lot of focus on, you know, trigger warnings and safe spaces and trying to protect people from pain. I'm not discounting their trauma, but it seems to be that our response is, if you have trauma, there's something wrong with you. And now we have to be very sensitive or you will break. That seems the opposite of what you and Dr. Frankel were talking about. I will tell you, the more you suffer, the stronger you become, because it's much easier to die than to live. And I was very suicidal after I was liberated. Not while I was there, but when I realized my parents are not coming back, the reality hit me.

14:50I know that some voice was talking to me, told me that if I die, I will never find out what happens. And it's better to be for something than against something. And that's how I joined the healing arts profession. Healing is different from curing. So the doctors and I work together and they do the curing and realize that some people need medication because they have something too much of or too little of. And it's very important to have a very good physical, to have a good, good, good testing of everything from top to toe, because talking therapy is not enough many times.

15:43Ryan Holiday: I think that the thing that struck me most about Man's Search for Meaning was he has this paragraph in the book where he says, you know, we ask what is the meaning of life? And he says, that's wrong. Life is asking us what meaning we are going to create with our actions. And not only that, but I think it's a discovery. and I like to go to Auschwitz as an opportunity to discover the part in you that no Nazi could touch my spirit. They could throw me in a gas chamber any minute. I had no control over the external but I could never touch the spirit that I bring you.

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19:03Ryan Holiday: Dr. Eager, I had a strangely personal question on my end that I thought you might be able to help me with. So I recently got reconnected with someone who had been sort of a motherly, grandmotherly figure in my life when I was much younger. And I don't know why we fell out of touch, but we hadn't talked for 15 or almost 20 years, I guess. She's 93 and we got reconnected recently. And I had these two kind of overwhelming emotions. One, I feel a lot of guilt that we fell out of touch. And then I feel this sort of overwhelming feeling of urgency and happiness having been reconnected. But then I can't shake the guilt that I feel that I fell out of touch with this person when time is so limited, especially with someone who is in their 90s.

19:55I give you a sentence, one sentence. If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. And that's the end of that guilt. Guilt is in the past. And there's one thing you cannot change is the past.

20:14Ryan Holiday: That's very beautiful and actually quite freeing. So thank you. And it's funny, I was talking to her, and her name is Dolores. And I was talking to her as I was preparing to talk to you. And this question struck me that there are very few people alive today. You're obviously one of them. Because I was reading about the woman who was a friend of Anne Frank's as a girl who just recently passed. And I was thinking how few people are alive today who were alive before we knew that humanity was capable of the terrible things that you experience in your life. Obviously, humanity has always been capable and done terrible things, but it struck me as a consciousness that is worth maybe exploring or wondering.

21:06Ryan Holiday: I'm curious what you think about that idea. Well, all you have to do is get someone a name and then they stop being humans. You don't kill people. You kill gooks and, you know, whatever they call the Jewish people. Sure. Tykes. And I think it's important before you say anything, ask yourself. I do that, especially when I visit my children, having dinner and I want to interrupt, I ask myself, is it important? Is it necessary? But most of all, is it kind? And if it's not kind, I just don't say it. Maybe Marianne notices when I take my hand and I put it here. That means I tell myself, shut up, mother, enjoy the dinner, be a good, compassionate listener.

22:00Yes, because that's what I do all day long. I listen.

22:04Ryan Holiday: Dr. Ingle, you were saying that your mother never talked about her experiences until you were, what, 12, that you even learned what she had been through. Why do you think that was? Since I've moved to New York, I've met a lot of people who, not a lot, but some, whose parents were Holocaust survivors. And their description of their childhoods where they sat at dinner and the parents talked about the way life used to be before. And I remembered how depressed they were for their parents. It just, there was so much emotion around dinnertime. Sure. And I remember my father saying to me, you can always tell who's been suffering because the first thing they want to tell you is who they were before.

22:52And I was so grateful that he had said that because that was not the conversation we talked about the things families talk about. And the only time that I ever heard much about it, I mean, I knew that my parents' parents had died because I had no grandparents. Well, as I've grown up, I've been very appreciative that I didn't have to go through my early life the way a lot of my, these people I've met described their lives. And my parents were just, they wanted, they were so grateful to be in America. I mean, the communists had tried to kill my father. You know, it was not a good scene. But they also had to leave all their money behind, so they had to come and make it here.

23:34And that's what they were focused on. We're going to make it. It's going to be okay. Survivors ran two ways. They either didn't want to say anything, or they talked about it all the time. And I was a new age. I did this and that. I had no, no, no, no. I think relationship Relationships between mothers and daughters are always complicated and also joyful. And I think that my mother really worked hard at making me feel like I could do whatever I wanted to do. I just had to do them. And she was not the kind of mother who checked my homework. She was busy. We had our own career. I had a sister and a brother.

24:17My father was making his way with his company. You know, she wasn't that kind of mother, but I also knew that if there was something I thought was important to do, you know, do it. That kind of message and watching her do what she needed to do step by step, I think has been so critical for me and my life. And I think that all mothers, I'm a mother, grandmother, I think it's so important for children to feel that we take seriously what they think is important. And then we can talk about maybe what they do with that or whatever. But taking children seriously is something that not every family does.

25:01And yet, maybe by avoiding some of the other things, they took some of my things more seriously.

25:07Ryan Holiday: You were telling me, Dr. Engel, earlier that you were a psychologist before your mother, that your mother had gotten the advice that, you know, you're going to be 50 anyway, so you might as well go back to school and get your job when you're 50. I'm curious how that example of watching your mother persevere, not just, you know, to the things that happened before you were born, but then also make her way as, you know, an immigrant to a new country in a profession, I imagine at that time, almost entirely dominated by men. What have you learned from watching how your mother tackles the things that life deals her?

25:46You can probably tell, but my mother's pretty adorable. So when she puts her mind to something and she works hard at it and she wants it badly, you want it for her too because you love her and you want to see her do and succeed and be. That's the beauty of parenting if you can do it in a way that you can keep the kids adoring you because usually little kids adore their parents. It just sort of gets worse as time goes on. but she's always been very good at just kind of keeping us on her side. I think respect is so important that you look at your parents as a child and you say that someday I want to be like him or you want to say when I grow up I'll never be like him.

26:41I want to be everything he's not. that makes it sometimes more than the other one because you want to prove something and if you want to prove anything, you're still a prisoner you gotta make peace with your parents and divorce your parents and then you have a good adult relationship with each other

27:04Ryan Holiday: The idea of forgiveness I know I've struggled with this it can be hard to forgive your parents not just for stuff that they may have done, but But for who they were or weren't, depending on what you wanted or who you are, I think that the struggle to forgive and move on and adjust the relationship to one of equals or one of sort of mutual understanding, that's a very difficult transition for people to make. When I spoke to Marianne, one thing she told me that I tell everybody, She told me I don't have any godly power to forgive anybody. The only thing I can do is give myself a gift that I let go of part of me who is judgmental.

27:54This thing about forgiveness, you know, it's so hard in general to let it go. And yet if you don't let it go, you're carrying it around and it affects everything.

28:05Ryan Holiday: You call forgiveness a gift that you give yourself, right? Well, it is forgiving yourself, like for you with that woman, that you didn't take the time to stay close to her because you had a life to live. And frankly, you were probably doing the more appropriate thing. But it's amazing how many messages we give ourselves about things that we feel regretful of or sad about or wish we had done differently, on and on and on. and one of the things we talk about is you give yourself permission. I tell my patients this, okay, you get seven minutes a day to say all the negative things about yourself that you want to say.

28:47And if you don't have seven minutes, you can have three. And then it's over. If any thought comes to you during the day, you say, no, no, this is not my moment to do that. I have to wait for my right time. And once people start to let that go, they get a lot more done and they begin to grow inside themselves in a way that they hadn't allowed themselves to do before.

29:09Ryan Holiday: Edie, when I talked to you maybe about a year ago, you gave me a really good piece of advice that I've been thinking about since. You said, I was telling you about something that I regretted that I felt bad about. And you said, I'm going to clear that up for you in just a few words. And you said the magic words are, if I knew then what I knew now, I would do things differently. Wow, precious to remember such thing. Thank you. And yes, if I knew then, I wouldn't have gone to Auschwitz and I wouldn't have gone through the experience of suffering because I know that suffering made me stronger. and I know that you have suffered yourself.

29:57I hope forgiveness is not about me forgiving you for what you did to me. I don't have that kind of God language. I'm a human being. I make mistakes and I learn from history because if you don't, you are evolving rather than evolving. I like to be a good role model, to live a useful life. I get up in the morning and I look at life in one day. That morning sunshine may not come back. I think it's good for you to remember today that you gave birth to the you that was meant to be free. And the other effort is freedom from the prison that you created in your own mind.

30:56Ryan Holiday: And then actually, before I wrap up, I wanted to bring you a little chapter in Daily Dad that was inspired by Dr. Eager. A little parenting lesson I took from her as well.

31:12Ryan Holiday: Your kid will be whatever you make them. The Holocaust survivor-turned-psychologist and author, Dr. Edith Egger, had a son who was born with athetoid cerebral palsy. One day, on a visit to the doctor's office, Dr. Egger expressed some of her fears and worries to the specialist, and it was there that she got some advice that is worth sharing with every parent whether your family has ever had to face this kind of adversity or not. Your son will be whatever you make of him, the doctor explained. And John's going to do everything everyone else does, but it's going to take him longer to get there. You can push him too hard and that will backfire, but it will also be a mistake not to push him hard enough.

31:58Ryan Holiday: You need to push him to the level of his potential. Your kids will be whatever you make them. No one is saying that things won't be hard. No one is saying that any of this is fair. dyslexia or disabilities, being a refugee or losing their job, being a genius or short. What matters is how we push them and push ourselves. What matters is the kindness and love and the patience that accompany that pushing. We can't do everything for them, but we can believe in them and help them believe in themselves. We can help them reach their level of potential. We can make them be what they are capable of being.

32:44Ryan Holiday: You know, this is just a woman who I think truly embodies forgiveness, who found strength in suffering. And like I said, her wisdom changed my life.