By: Ali Elizabeth Turner
When you have lived as long as I have (which in a few weeks will be 73 years), you start to find that life, even life as a believer, is not at all what or how you expected it would be. It is moving so fast that things seem to be a blur, and so many things that you used to feel you needed in order to be happy just don’t matter. But what does matter more than ever is having the sense that all your experiences, faux pas, failures, triumphs, and adventures have not been in vain, and may just end up being useful to those coming behind you.
I remember so clearly when Baby Boomers wore buttons that said, “Never trust anybody over 30,” and now I have turned 30 two plus times. I have discovered that indeed it is a good idea to trust people who are significantly older than I, and I have been grieving the loss of one. Her name was Dr. Edie Eger. I never met her, but had the strangest sense of knowing her well and loving her more. She was a Holocaust survivor, a therapist, enormously funny, a former Olympic gymnast, and a ballerina.
Edie got kicked off the Hungarian Olympic Gymnastics Team because she was Jewish. Then she and her family were sent to Auschwitz. She was literally on her way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz with her mother when Dr. Josef Mengele pulled her out of the line and commanded her to dance for him. Her mother went on to her death, and somehow Edie found the strength to compartmentalize enough to give the literal performance of a lifetime. Mengele rewarded her with a loaf of bread, and she shared it with her fellow prisoners.
One of Edie’s great gifts to me was learning to use curiosity as a coping tool. In a death camp, all normal sense of agency, of having any control over one’s life or circumstances, is completely stripped away. I have heard her quip that when they got up at 5 a.m. and were told they were going to “the showers,” she and her fellow prisoners would say things like, “Hmmm, I vundah iff vee ahr going to da showers or iff ve ahr going to da SHOW-uhs! Or, “Hmmmm, I vunduh how today tuhns out?” It was actually adding the sense of curiosity to her unspeakable situation that brought help. She was also a believer and said that she met “this nice Jewish boy vehn I was in da camp. His name was Jesus.” Edie was forced to go on a death march right before liberation came in 1945. She nearly collapsed, and her fellow prisoners carried her, sparing her life.
Edie married, had two daughters, and became a world-renowned therapist, as well as best-selling author. But for me, there are three things about her that have deeply affected me. One was that she didn’t get her PhD until she was 50. Another was that she seemed to “go after” the toughest cases imaginable, as far as helping people who had experienced trauma were concerned. And, she never quit working. She was still working at the age of 98 when she passed. She used to quip that her large and loving family was her “revenge against Hitler.” However, she knew the power of forgiveness like few I have ever encountered.
Edie lived a life of excellence all the way to the end, and I want to be like her when I grow up.
