FROM HER WORDS
DR. EDITH EVA EGER
A reflection on life, love, hope, risk and kindness.
Some of my favorite words are four-letter words…
Edith, before the war.
Each person is born, and each person will die, but between those two events is something we call life, one of my favorite four-letter words. The question is how you will live it.
Life can and will pass you by. You must be willing to take a risk, another of my favorite four-letter words. Take a risk to do what you love, to do what makes you happy. Take a risk to try connecting with another person.
When I was taken away to the Auschwitz death camp, I was a sixteen-year-old girl very much in love with my boyfriend at the time. He used to tell me my eyes were beautiful, and my hands were beautiful. Everything became about the uncertainty of life.
Wrapped up in that word, tomorrow, was hope—yet another four-letter word. It was only later I found out he had been shot dead the day before the camps were liberated.
The hope for tomorrow kept me going despite the uncertainty I faced every day.
The last thing my mother said to me before she was taken to the gas chambers was this:
“No one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind.”
Suffering, you see, can make you stronger. What comes out of your body doesn’t make you ill, but what you keep inside surely can. Helping someone means guiding people to look for the light in the darkness, to look for the hope in hopelessness.
Love is not what you feel, it’s when you give yourself a gift, and the gift is forgiveness.
Why? Because it’s for giving away, so you don’t have to carry negativity, so you can let go of whatever is hurting inside you, such as pain, anger, and bitterness.
Life continued.
What is hope?
It’s something you must never give up.
I expressed hope in the death camps by changing even hatred into pity. I felt sorry for the guards who had been so brainwashed they could believe the lies they’d been told and could do such horrible things to people just for being who they were.
When people in positions of authority and leadership tell people a lie over and over again, people will begin to believe it, which is why you must always be willing to question authority rather than following it blindly.
People need to know it’s okay to not feel so good. It’s okay to be disappointed, but it’s not okay to be discouraged. Give up the saying of “Yes, but…” and instead always say “Yes, and…”
What you say to yourself is also important. Pay attention to your self-talk. Does your self-talk empower you or deplete you? If it’s depleting you, then you must change it.
Change the way you think, and you can change your life.
When people say they’d be so happy if they look as good as I do when they reach my age (I will be 95 in September 2022), I always give the same response:
You must be happy inside.
If you are, then it won’t matter to you what you look like on the outside, but as it turns out you will naturally look better too!
My wish for you and everyone in this world today at this moment has everything to do with my favorite four-letter words:
LIFE
Celebrate yourself as the completely unique, one-of-a-kind person you are.
LOVE
First love yourself, then love others.
KIND
Be kind to yourself and be kind to others.
RISK
Be willing to take risks to truly live life to the fullest.
— Dr. Edith Eva Eger
HOPE
Look for it constantly and never let go of it.
EDITH EVA EGER
Hungary → Czechoslovakia → United States
Psychologist · Author · Teacher
A Holocaust survivor, psychologist, and bestselling author, Dr. Edith Eger has spent her life transforming unimaginable suffering into a message of hope, freedom, and the extraordinary power of the human spirit to heal.