For years, Edith Eger kept quiet, refusing to speak about the cattle cars or the death camps or the Nazi guard who broke her back. She never told her children how, at 16, she had been forced to dance for Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” who had sent her mother to die earlier that day. Nor did she talk about the death march she endured near the end of the war, and the fact that she resorted to eating grass to survive at a time when others turned to cannibalism.
She couldn’t find the words. She didn’t want anyone’s pity. And she was determined, she said, “to be a source of life,” not pain.
But by the time she was in her early 50s, working as a clinical psychologist in the United States, she had begun to feel “like an impostor.” Dr. Eger specialized in trauma, helping combat veterans, cancer patients and victims of abuse. Yet like so many of the people who came to her for help, she had not fully dealt with her past, which threatened to consume her even as she tried to move past it.
“I could not be a good guide to my patients or take them any further than I’d gone myself,” she said. “For that, I had to go back to the lion’s den and look at the place where my mother was murdered, where I was so close to death every day.”
In 1980, Dr. Eger willed herself to return to Auschwitz, where she visited the gas chambers and crematoria. She still vividly remembered the moment a more experienced inmate had gestured toward the chimney, after Dr. Eger had been separated from her mother and father, and told her, “You’d better talk about your parents in past tense. They’re burning there.”
The trip marked the culmination of a long process in which Dr. Eger said she learned to let go of the shame and guilt that she felt as a survivor. Driven to speak out, partly as a way to honor her parents and other victims, she told her story in lecture halls and classrooms. And on the eve of her 90th birthday in 2017, she published a memoir, “The Choice.”
The book became an international bestseller and led Dr. Eger to write a young-adult edition as well as a more practical follow-up, “The Gift,” in which she offered advice for readers struggling with feelings of hopelessness, anger, resentment or fear.
“We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love,” she wrote. “Which one we reach for … is up to us.”
Dr. Eger, who continued to see patients into her final year, died April 27 at 98, at home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. Her grandson Jordan Engle said she died of complications from severe scoliosis, a condition that he traced back to the war, when a guard hit Dr. Eger in the back with the butt of his rifle after she climbed over a fence to search for food.
Looking back on her war years, Dr. Eger said she was able to keep going by following advice her mother had given in the darkness of the cattle car, en route to Auschwitz: “Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
When she felt hungry, she imagined that she was preparing her mother’s recipes for chicken paprikash and Székely goulash. When she worried she wouldn’t be able to make it another day, she dreamed of her future wedding.
“I created my own world,” she told the Times of London. “They couldn’t touch my spirit.”
The youngest of three daughters, she was born Edith Eva Elefánt on Sept. 29, 1927, to a tailor and homemaker in what is now Kosice, Slovakia. The city was part of Czechoslovakia before being ceded to Hungary in 1938.
Dr. Eger grew up in the shadow of her talented older sisters: Klara, a violin prodigy, and Magda, a pianist. Her parents had hoped their third child would be a boy, and young Edie, as she was known, sensed their disappointment. She felt further isolated because she was cross-eyed, a condition that was corrected through surgery but left her feeling like “an ugly duckling.”
“I became kind of a little owl on a tree, watching, observing as a child,” she said in a 1992 interview for the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project. “And I did the same thing in Auschwitz.”
She gained confidence while attending ballet school, and by the early 1940s, she had turned to gymnastics. She trained with the Hungarian national team, dreaming of an Olympic medal. But, in what she described as one of the most devastating moments of her life, she was abruptly cut from the team, told that she no longer qualified because she was Jewish.
“I thought I could be really great. And then Hitler destroyed all that,” Dr. Eger told Ireland’s Sunday Independent.
By March 1944, when German troops marched through Kosice, Klara was studying at a music conservatory in Budapest, where she managed to hide out during the war. The rest of the family were forced from their home and sent to live at a brick factory, where thousands of Jews from the city were interned before being taken away.
Told that they would be sent to work in the fields, they boarded a train that took them across the border to Auschwitz, in occupied Poland. An orchestra was playing as they arrived.
“You see,” Dr. Eger’s father said, “it can’t be a terrible place.” He was guided into a men’s line as families were separated by gender. She never saw him again.
In another line, she had her first encounter with Mengele, a notorious SS physician who conducted medical experiments on prisoners. He pointed her mother to the right, toward the gas chambers, while sending Edie and Magda to the left. “You’re going to see your mother very soon,” Dr. Eger recalled him saying. “She’s just going to take a shower.”
When Mengele came to her barracks that night looking for entertainment, friends pushed her forward, saying that she was a dancer. Ordered to perform, she closed her eyes, imagined that she was onstage at the Budapest opera house, and danced to Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Outside, she could hear an orchestra playing “The Blue Danube.”
“I took myself into another world, in another where,” Dr. Eger said in the oral history. Her reward was a piece of bread, which she shared with the other prisoners.
An estimated 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz, the majority of them Jews. Edie saw guards shooting a child in a tree for target practice. Once, she was beaten with a dog leash when she sneaked out from the barracks to go to the bathroom.
“I couldn’t fight or flee, but I learned how to stay in a situation and make the best of what is. I still had choices,” she told Britain’s Observer newspaper. “So when we were stripped and shorn of our hair, Magda asked me, ‘How do I look?’ She looked like a mangy dog, but I told her: ‘Your eyes are so beautiful. I never noticed when you had all that hair.’ Every day, we could choose to pay attention to what we’d lost or what we still had.”
As the war neared its end, the sisters were shuffled between concentration camps. Allied troops were closing in when the sisters and other prisoners were forced to march to Gunskirchen, in Austria. Those who fell behind were killed. When Edie stumbled, she said, she was rescued by friends who “formed a chair with their arms,” carrying her along and enabling her to survive.
By the time U.S. soldiers liberated Gunskirchen in May 1945, she was sick and starving. She was nearly left for dead before a GI spotted her in a pile of bodies. The following year, at age 19, she married Béla Eger, a Jewish underground fighter whom she met while recovering at a tuberculosis hospital in the Tatra Mountains.
“We were like shipwrecked, lonely people,” she recalled.
The couple moved to Béla’s childhood home in Presov, in what was then eastern Czechoslovakia, only to flee the country’s communist authorities and immigrate to the United States in 1949. They lived in Baltimore, where Dr. Eger did piecework at a garment factory, and then in El Paso, where she went to college and became a high school teacher while her husband worked as an accountant.
Dr. Eger said she began to reckon with her experiences after reading “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a 1946 book by psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. They struck up a correspondence, and a friendship, as Dr. Eger went on to earn a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso, writing her dissertation on the way concentration camp stress affects survivors.
Some survivors became her patients, including a twin on whom Mengele had experimented at Auschwitz.
Dr. Eger was predeceased by her husband, who died in 1993, and her sisters, who settled in Baltimore and Sydney after the war. Survivors include three children, Marianne Engle, Audrey Thompson and John Eger; five grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
Even in her 90s, Dr. Eger said that hardly a day went by when she didn’t find herself “vividly” back in Auschwitz, transported into her memories by the sight of barbed wire or the shout of a bus driver.
“But it’s fleeting,” she told the Times. “I don’t get stuck. … Part of me is in Auschwitz. But not the bigger part. Not the better part.”
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