Art journaling on an old canvas

Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick (Edith Eva Eger)

I have just finished reading Edith Eva Eger’s book The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017). Dr. Edith Eva Eger was just a young teenager when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, in 1944. Her parents lost their lives there. Today, at age ninety, Dr. Eger maintains a clinical psychology practice, holds a faculty appointment at the University of California, and regularly gives lectures around the country and abroad, also serving as a consultant in resiliency training and the treatment of PTSD in soldiers and war veterans. She has appeared on numerous television programs, and was the primary subject of a Holocaust documentary that appeared on Dutch National Television. She received a California State Senate Humanitarian Award in 1992 and gave the International Conference of Logotherapy keynote address at Viktor Frankl’s ninetieth birthday celebration.

The foreward to the book is written by Phil Zimbardo, the creator of the famed Stanford prison experiment (1971). He writes ‘her goal is nothing less than to help each of us to escape the prisons of our own minds. Each of us is in some way mentally imprisoned, and it is Edie’s mission to help us realize that just as we can act as our own jailors, we can also be our own liberators. When Edie is introduced to young audiences, she is often called “the Anne Frank who didn’t die,” because Edie and Anne were of a similar age and upbringing when they were deported to the camps’. He mentions that in his own work he has studied the psychological foundations of negative social influence and has tried to understand the mechanisms by which we conform and obey or simply stand by in situations where peace and justice can be served only if we act heroically. He writes ‘Edie has helped me to discover that heroism is not the province only of those who perform extraordinary deeds or take impulsive risks to protect themselves or others— though Edie has done both of these things. Heroism is rather a mind-set or an accumulation of our personal and social habits. It is a way of being. And it is a special way of viewing ourselves. To be a hero requires taking effective action at crucial junctures in our lives, to make an active attempt to address’. Read more