The wisdom acquired after suffering
In 1944 Edith Eger is a sixteen-year-old ballerina. She is sent to Auschwitz. When she is liberated she realizes how much her suffering created an inner prison, a place in her mind where the darkest experiences she had to go through in camp are locked away.
**My review**
I thought of one quote said by Churchill when I finished reading this book : if you're going through hell, keep going. The choice. Even in hell hope can flower written by Edith Eger is a powerful book. I remained utterly impressed by how powerful the human spirit can be.
This is the sort of memoir book that you can't get your hands off. I was cringing at every page, eager to know if our hero will survive. I was heartbroken to read about how Eric, the first boy Edith fell in love with, died one day before the liberation. The thought that she might be able to see him again kept her alive in the death camps. How powerful love is! How someone can still remember the way your eyes sparkle or how the touch of your hand feels like even if you are separated!
Edith lost a part of her adolescence in camps. She lost the innocence, the chance of a new life . She lost her parents. She lost the chance of a lovestory with Eric. What striked me the most was the fact that Edith confessed how she wasn't suicidal while in Auschwitz but as soon as she returned to a normal life she felt utterly depressed and without a purpose.
How do you discover who you are when everything you loved dearly is taken away from you? This is a tough challenge and Edith is remarkably honest with her readers, confessing all of her tribulations.
The lovestory Edith had with her husband Bela is one of a kind. She did not have a crush on him. She felt no butterflies. She was hungry and she had to think of her sisters as well. Bela was older and he had a good financial situation. I can't forget how Edith said that her eyes sparkled when Bela came and brough salami and Swiss cheese. Imagine being so hungry and so poor that you can't afford to think of love!
Their relationship grew so beautifully! It is a pleasure to read about their own self-discovery during their marriage and how having children changed the way Edith looked at life. When she filed for a divorce decades later it was a shock. You might wonder: after all of the hardships they went through, why divorce? I will let you discover in the book the reason of their divorce but let me tell you one thing: love is the strongest forces from our Universe and if you don't know how to love yourself you can't love anybody else.
Fortunately, Edith remarried. She was more than happy to have a choice this time, to not pick a husband because she is hungry. This time she wanted to get married because she really loved the other person abd because she wanted to spend her life growing old together. She picked... Bela. Again!
That is the gift of my divorce: the recognition that I have to face up to what's inside me. If I am really going to improve my life, it isn't Bela or our relationship that has to change. It's me.
What a story, right? A couple who divorced, stayed separated , figured out that they do not want to live without each other and...remarried. I shall say that the story of Edith is worthy of a Hollywood movie.
This is a book about discovering a glimpse of happiness even in hell. This is a book about the power of love and how marriage should always feel like a choice, not as an obligation. And finally this is a book about surviving mentally in a cruel environment, where humans humiliate other humans.
There is a quote in the book which impressed me a lot:
Each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for - our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom - is up to us.
**MY FAVORITE QUOTES**
But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful - I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I'm here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.
Victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you.We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization
I would love to help you discover how to escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be
It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But : What is mine to do with the life I've been given?
"Dicuka" , she says into the dark one night, "listen. We don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. Just remember , no one can take away from what you've put in your mind.
"All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside", my ballet master had told me. I never understood what he meant. Until Auschwitz.
Food fantasies sustained us at Auschwitz. Just as athletes and musicians can become better at their craft through mental practice, we were barracks artists, always in the thick of creating. What we made in our minds provided its own kind of sustenance
What if the unknown could make us curious instead of gut us with fear?
"We've escaped the gas chamber, but we'll die eating potato peels", someone says, and we laugh from a deep place in us that we didn't know still existed. We laugh, as I did every week at Auschwitz when we were forced to donate our blood for transfusions for wounded German soldiers. I would sit with the needle in my arm and humor myself. Good luck winning a war with my pacifist dancer's blood! I'd think. I couldn't yank my arm away, or I'd have been shot. I couldn't defy my oppressors with a gun or a fist.But I could find a way to my own power. And there's power in our laughter now
I've never found it difficult to see that it isn't God who is killing us in gas chambers, in ditches, on cliff sides, on 186 white stairs. God doesn't run the death camps. People do.
It's been more than a month since liberation. Magda and I have spent almost every hour of the last forty days together in this room. We have regained the use of our bodies, we have regained the ability to talk and to write and even to try to dance.We can talk about Klara, about our hope that somewhere she is alive and trying to find us. But we can't talk about what we have endured.Maybe in our silence we are trying to create a sphere that is free from our trauma.
When I have been home a few weeks, although I am barely strong enough, I make the journey on foot to Eric's old apartment. No one from his family has returned. The apartment is empty. I vow to go back as often as I can. The pain of staying away is greater than the disappointment of vigilance. To mourn him is to mourn more than a person. In the camps I could long for his physical presence and hold on to the promise of our future. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose. Now I must come to terms with the fact that anyone I marry won't know my parents
I wasn't suicidal at Auschwitz, when things were hopeless. Everyday I was surrounded by people who said, "The only way you'll get out of here is as a corpse". But the dire prophecies gave me something to fight against.Now that I am recuperating, now that I am facing the irrevocable fact that my parents are never coming back, that Eric is never coming back, the only demons are within. I think of taking my own life. I want a way out of pain. Why not choose not to be?
One weekend Bela visits me, pulling Swiss cheese and salami from a bag. Food. This is what I fall in love with first. If I can keep him interested in me, he will feed me and mynsisters - this is what I think. I don't pine for him the way I did for Eric. I don't even flirt - not in a romantic way. We are like two shipwrecked people staring at the sea for signs of life
But I saw we marry our unfinished business. For Bela and me , our unfinished business is grief
To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough
I had been ready to forsake our marriage in order to take Marianne to America. However painfully, I had been willing to sacrifice our family, our partnership - the very things Bela had been unable to accept losing. And so we began our new life on an unequal footing. I could feel that though his devotion to us could be measured in all that he had given up, he was still dizzy from what he had lost. And where I felt relief and joy, he felt hurt.
Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn't heal pain. It makes the pain worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before. In running from the past -from my fear- I didn't find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence.
The anger I am most afraid is my own
I don't know that fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don't know that my habits of providing and placating -of pretending- are only making us worse.
In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl's teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. Each moment is a choice.No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.
It was an accrual of experiences, not a sudden recognition, that led me to divorce Bela. My choice had something to do with my mother - what she had chosen and what she hadn't been allowed to choose.[...]she opted to leave the life she had chosen for herself in favor of the life she was expected to live. In marrying Bela, I feared I had done the same thing- forgone taking responsibility for my own dreams in exchange for the safety Bela provided me. Now the qualities that had drawn me to him, his ability to provide and caretake, felt suffocating, our marriage felt like an abdication of myself. I didn't want the kind of marriage my parents had - lonely, lacking in intimacy - and I didn't want their broken dreams. But what did I want for myself? I didn't know. And so I erected Bela as a force to push against. In place of discovering my own genuine purpose and direction, I found meaning in fighting against him, against the ways I imagined that he limited me.
I had lost my childhood to the war, my adolescence to the death camps, and my young adulthood to the compulsion to never look back. I had become a mother before I grieved my own mother's death. I had tried too fast and too soon to be whole. It wasn't Bela's fault that I had chosen denial, that I often kept myself, my memories, my true opinions and experiences hidden, even from him. But now I held him responsible for prolonging my stuckness.[...]With Eric there had been sparks, a flush all over my body when he was near. Even Auschwitz didn't kill the romantic girl in me, the girl who told herself each day that she will meet him again. But after the war, that dream died. When I met Bela, I wasn't in love ; I was hungry. And he brought me Swiss cheese. He brought me salami.
What are my disowned feelings? They are like strangers living in my house, invisible except for the food they steal, the furniture they leave out of place, the mud they trail down the hall. Divorce doesn't liberate me from their uneasy presence. Divorce empties the room of other distractions, of the habitual targets of my blame and resentment, and forces me to sit alone with my feelings.
That is the gift of my divorce: the recognition that I have to face up to what's inside me. If I am really going to improve my life, it isn't Bela or our relationship that has to change. It's me.
Now that I have faced myself a little more fully, I can see the emptiness I felt in our marriage wasn't a sign of something wrong in our relationship, it was the void I carry with me, even now, the void that no man or achievement will ever fill. Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.
♡In 1971, two years after our divorce, when I am forty-four years old, Bela kneels and presents me with an engagement ring. [...] this time we are really choosing each other, we aren't in flight, we aren't running away.
When we come to believe that there is no way to be loved and to be genuine, we are at risk of denying our true nature.
Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken -you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing
You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.
But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren't fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.
When you have something to prove, you aren't free.
When we grieve, it's not just over what happened - we grieve for what didn't happen.
You can't heal what you can't feel
It's easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our marriage has taught me that - all the times when my anger or frustration at Bela has taken my attention away from my own work and growth, the times when blaming him for my unhappiness was easier than taking responsibility for myself
Revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.
When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves
Release begins with acceptance.
To heal is to cherish the wound
♡Each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for - our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom - is up to us.
Our painful experiences aren't a liability -they're a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strenght
We remain victims as long as we hold another person responsible for our own well-being
The second step in the dance of freedom is learning how to take risks that are necessary to true self-realization
Time doesn't heal. It's what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility , when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief
The biggest prison is in your own mind
Hi Mary! What a beautiful post. This book definitely caught my attention and I'll make sure to read it. Thanks for the review and recommendation.
Yesterday I saw a movie that got me thinking about the importance of not only acknowledging the darkness within us but embracing it as part of ourselves. It's about love, like you say, and like Edith eventually realized.
I can tell I'm going to cry plenty of times while reading this book. But I think it'll also make me feel hope, and I look forward to that.
Thank you for sharing!
Hello! Thank you a lot for your words and appreciation! I am a sucker for lovestories, I will always have a soft spot for happy endings and for love, in general. It always gives me hope to see couples who succeed in maintaining the love and solve any issues. The lovestory between Bela and Edith is quite a journey in itself, but I enjoyed it all the way. I dream of growing old with someone like that, there is joy in overcoming adversity together and still deeply care about each other.
Yes , crying is natural. I smile even now when I write to you, knowing how much this book touched me.I am more than happy to share it.🤗
Intriguing story right there. Mental health is a really big priority people often ignore and neglect. Depression as a result of heartbreaks seems to be so common these days. It is such a sensitive matter which should not be treated with any form or iota of levity.
Love and depression.....this is a tough topic. We all had suffered because of love. To be more precise, it isn't love to blame as the wrong ways in which people use this emotion. Looking back I think that most of the suffering comes from people not knowing/wanting to love us how we need it. The pain arises. The suffering comes from staying in that situation hoping it for it to change. A heartbreak is truly painful. I now believe that the worst is not necessarily the heartbreak, but the realization that you weren't loved at all. To love and to not be loved back is probably the most painful thing, I would not desire this even to my enemies.
In the case of Edith the suffering in her lovestory came from her own unresolved trauma. I think it is the same with us, humans. We already have the pain inside, the loved one only brings it to the surface, showing where we need to heal.
Love....such a wide topic. It is beautiful as it can be painful. Healthy loving relationships are really important as we need a relationship in which we can grow and heal. I truly believe love is the most important thing in the world , we would be utterly alone without it.
Powerful and quite sensitive words. I felt carried away by emotion when trying to picture the scenario, love is undoubtedly a universal force that can make or mar an individual. The mind remain a glorified prison for our outward expression and feelings. Thanks for sharing this deep piece, most life situations are better learnt than experience because all may not have the courage to absorb the trumatization thereafter.
Hello! Thank you very much for stopping by! The ideal way is to have a mind-heart connection which can allow us to feel while also think. But some things can only be told through the language of love. Our mind can become our biggest prison , I think (ha) that it would be better to learn how to feel emotions rather than using the mind all the time.
I can't completely grasp what Edith has been through. I am strong believer in the fact that until you haven't experienced it, you can't understand it. So only a former prisoner can truly feel what she has felt. I can only imagine and ponder in awe, admiring the amount of strenght she must have had.
I think most of us are struggling with our life and the relationships we keep because we've not been able to love ourselves. How can you truely open up to another person, how can you show love to another person when you feel irritated with yourself. The hatred is so deep that you cannot even stand the thought of living. You then tend to hate everyone that comes around you or you just can't show them how much you love them.
I love your review @creativemary , made me want to just grab the book from your hand and start reading. I love books like this, books that talk about what we go through as human beings. Being a human isn't easy. Imagine having to marry someone so you can escape hunger, no matter how people would hate her for doing that, it was the only way for her to survive. A lot of us are making so many decisions so we able think about the consequences of our actions.
I'm glad she actually got to discover herself and truely find the love of her life. I truely wish that we'll all have something of a happy ending after all the trials we've faced in our lives.
Enjoyed reading your review, thank you for sharing
Hey! Learning how to love ourselves should be taught in school and to our parents. Nobody taught me this so I learned through observation. It took me years and a lot of painful experiences to teach me that I didn't love myself as I thought I did. I can trace this back to childhood, where a lot of criticism was around. We didn't talk about emotions or feelings, they were swept under the rug. We carry this with us in adulthood and romantic relationships bring to the surface all of the nasty demons. It did the same for Edith, she was also very criticized during her childhood and she became a perfectionist trying to please others.
I think that the process of loving yourself is different for each individual. I look at myself and see how hard it was for me to finally have the difficult conversations with all of the members of my family and to speak my mind. How many adults really trace the source of their trauma and make the courage to do the right thing? It is sad that maybe for some people they will have to live in vain, in the idea that they will be too old when they will realize why they haven't had real love in their life. But maybe that is their journey. We make our own fate. Edith was strong enough to hold a mirror and look at herself. It was an act of bravery to see that it wasn't her husband the problem, but her own trauma. I strongly believe that if you have a partner who can be with you in the highs and lows and still be close to your heart, then that love can't be torn apart. This is why she remarried Bela. Real life stories are better than Hollywood drama.
I loved the happy ending. It was inspiring to see such honesty written for all strangers to see.
Thank you a lot for stopping by🤗
Often books that are set in the author's life experience are more emotional for the reader. Especially if the writer expresses it honestly in the form of simple sentences that are close to the condition of the reader.
Hi! True, there is a sensitive chord touched inside of those who read. And if there isn't something in you which is somehow related with the feelings of the author then you don't click so well and profound with the story.
Reading is always a subjective experience. What brings me to tears might leave someone cold.
I have a soft spot for memoirs and for people who have succeeded in overcoming any harsh adversity. I have been through a lot myself and therefore I get more emotional every time I read a powerful book like this one.
Thank you for sharing this Mary! I needed this reminder. I carry a lot of darkness within me, a lot of pain, and trauma, I have been depressed since I was a kid. But at some point I actively chose the light over the darkness. For the most part anyway. The darkness still manages to pierce through from time to time and I am not proud of it. I will never be proud of it even though there used to be time I thought that it even helped me and that I loved it about myself. I used anger and hate a lot to propel myself further. But as I grow and learn every day. I no longer believe that helps me in any way.
You are so welcome! This book moved me. Depression is really a complex phenomenon. I struggled in my teens and later in adulthood because of some events which shook me to the core. In time it can become a hyperfunctional depression, something which eats you from the inside and you are not even aware. It is dark to go there. We put locks and close the door. It is also painful. I am sure that for all people who went through trauma it is better to heal gradually. About some things I can't talk for long. Only in short bursts of healing confessions. Some events still make me cry only if I think about them, I visit those wounds less often in my mind. I know I have to be patient with myself.
We can hide the depression through work, fun, entertainment, social media, drugs, alcohol, etc. But we can only fool ourselves for so long.
The light can't be without the dark. I learn to embrace and accept the darkness within. I know that it can bring the worst in me because of the unhealed wounds. This is a constant work throughout our lives. Romantic relationships will always touch that dark part from us because they carry us in the old patterns of flawed love which we learned in childhood. I often wonder if there are any children who had a normal, securing childhood.
I have recently took an assessment of my attachment style and it is fearful avoidant, one of the "worst" as it is very hard to treat aka heal. But I read the story of Eger and other stories like her. People can heal even from the worst trauma, from the most grueling abuse. They can live to forgive their abuser and truly learn how to love and be loved.
It is all about love. At the bottom of any dark depression there is an utter void , a chronic feeling of not having felt healthy genuine love. It hurts. It really hurts. But as adults we are no longer helpless and we can re-parent ourselves. We can heal. This is what I love the most about us, humans. That we have inside this body of flesh a tiny thing called heart. And it is so powerful that it can heal the soul. It takes faith, time, and a genuine desire to experience love as we deeply know it can be.
It is so beautiful that you take baby steps and that you slowly pull yourself into the light. Self acceptance and self love are a great way to start. I can relate with what you have said about anger and hate. I used to feel that a lot for some people who caused me a lot of pain, who abused me and bullied me in the worst ways. Anger consumes you, it is like drinking poison hoping for your abuser to die. Instead you die inside. I remember nights going to sleep crying, waiting in vain for the abuser to apologize . It never happened. I might die and those people will never come and apologize to my face for the harm . I am now at peace with this. Edith has done the same. Every survivor of any abuse has forgiven in order to move on. Letting go of the anger doesn't mean that you approve what they did, but it liberates you. I strongly believe in the laws of the Universe and the malice and abuse always goes back to those who have abused others. Life is so short, we can't spend it hating people who did not know or want to love us. I want to be so full of light inside that all the love I deserve and desire enters in my life. I wish the same for you, my talented gardener magnificent girl🤗🥰
I cannot even imagine going through something like that. I just can't.
You've convinced me to buy the book; I have a child who suffers depression and I have been looking for a way to help him look past that and not let it define him. I think having him read this book just may help.
It is an ordeal. But this is why this kind of stories are powerful, they move something inside of those who read them.
I highly recommend you another spectacular book written by a Holocaust survivor, it is Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. It is one of the books which changed my life. I hope it can do the same for your child.🤗
Thanks for the pointer! I'll certainly look into that one, too!
You are so welcome🤗
At first I scrolled from the first sentence to the last , then I wondered if I am the one who is going to sit and read all these but when I continue reading I discovered that I am supposed to finish it , this write up have helped me a lot , in a couple of weeks now I am going through depression and I have thought the possible means to get over it but I do have this post and always go though it and know if it can help me get well soon
I truly hope you succeed and I wish you strenght in your healing journey!