Hungarian-American psychotherapist Edith Eva Eger has died at the age of 98. That reports her family Tuesday. She gained fame with the book The Choiceher memoir about the Holocaust. “She slipped away with all the grace she lived with,” her family wrote.
Eger grew up in what is now Slovak Kosice, between 1939 and 1945 the city was in Hungarian hands and was called Kassa. Eger was seen as a talented ballerina and gymnast, she wanted to go to the Olympics. She continued to dance well into old age.
At the age of sixteen, in the spring of 1944, Eger was deported to Auschwitz with her father, mother and older sister Magda. Her parents were immediately gassed. Upon arrival at the mass extermination camp, Eger himself was asked to dance for Jozef Mengele, a notorious camp doctor who ‘selected’ people for the gas chambers and conducted ‘experiments’. The forced dancing would earn Eger the nickname ‘the ballerina of Auschwitz’.
Eger and her sister were transferred to the Austrian concentration camp Gunskirchen. When American soldiers freed them, they thought Eger was dead, like the fellow prisoners she was among. Eger weighed only 32 kilos, her back was broken. 15,000 Jews were deported from Kassa, and upon their return Eger and her sister turned out to be two of the seventy Jewish survivors from the city.
Eger married Béla Eger, also a Jewish survivor, when she was eighteen. The couple did not find it safe in post-war Eastern Europe and emigrated to the United States in 1949. There Eger obtained her PhD in clinical psychology – she remained active as a psychologist until her old age. After the age of ninety she wrote two books, one of which is also the title The ballerina of Auschwitz wears. Eger lived in San Diego, California.
“I kept thinking, if I survive today, I will be free tomorrow,” Eger said in 2020 NRC about her imprisonment in Auschwitz. “I never allowed the enemy to kill my spirit. You must always find hope in hopelessness.”
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