When people living on the frontlines of the Israel-Hamas conflict began writing me letters after the October 7 attacks, I asked myself the question that has plagued me for much of my life: Why me? That question used to mean: Why was my childhood interrupted by war and loss? Why did we have to endure hell on Earth? Why did I survive the Nazi death camps when my parents and six million others perished?
This time, the question meant: What can a 97-year-old Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor say to the people whose lives hang in the balance in this conflict — or to anyone of any nationality, ethnicity, race, or faith who is feeling the pain, loss, uncertainty, fear, and fatigue of this brutal war? Do I have what it takes to connect with them, survivor to survivor? Can I pass on my strength instead of my loss?
In my four decades as a psychologist, this has been my lighthouse: to guide others through suffering. To be useful.
I wish I could tell you that once the crisis has passed — which it will; everything is temporary — you will pick yourself up and move on. But healing isn’t simple; it isn’t “one and done.” The effects of trauma linger. Life tests us.
Early in my career as a clinical psychologist, a 14-year-old boy who had participated in a car theft was sent to me by a judge. The boy wore brown boots and a brown shirt. He leaned his elbow on my desk. He said, “It’s time for America to be white again. I’m going to kill all the Jews, all the n*ggers, all the Mexicans, all the ch*nks.”
I thought I would be sick. I struggled not to run from the room. “What is the meaning of this?” I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, and say, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber.” I would have been justified. And maybe it was my job to set him straight; maybe that’s why God had sent him my way, to nip his hate in the bud. I could feel the rush of righteousness. It felt good to be angry. Better angry than afraid.
But then I heard a voice within. Find the bigot in you, the voice said. Find the bigot in you.
I tried to silence that voice. I listed my many objections to the very notion that I could be a bigot: I came to America penniless. I used the “colored” bathroom in solidarity with my African American fellow factory workers. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation. But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are. I knew to impart any change in this young man’s perspective and future, I’d have to do the unthinkable: Listen to him.
The boy continued to rant about the blights to America’s purity. My whole being trembled with unease; I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, and make him accountable for his hate — without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Even if he had, withholding my forgiveness wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.
I had an opportunity to accept this young person, just for him, for his singular being and our shared humanity. The opportunity to welcome him to say anything, feel anything, without the fear of being judged.
And so I gathered myself up, and I looked at this young man as openly as I could. I said three words: “Tell me more.”
I didn’t say much more than that during his first visit. I listened. I empathized. He was so much like me after the war. We had both lost our parents — his to neglect and abandonment, mine to death. We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods.
In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to hear him, I was able to give him something his brown shirt and brown boots couldn’t: an authentic image of his own worth.
When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice; he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, “You are too much for me.”
To everyone living through this war, I see you. You are struggling for survival. You are confronting the immediate intrusion of threat and loss. You are calling on inner strength and resources to get you through. You are calling on something larger than yourself — your family, your community, your faith, your hope.
Years from now, you’ll confront your pain in new ways. You’ll have new opportunities to choose your relationship with the past, to come to terms with what happened to you. Perhaps, like me, you will realize that you’re stuck in the dark, that you long to be free.
For many years, my anger ruled me. I felt it was never going to end. That it would consume me. So I suppressed it, which was damaging to myself (the opposite of expression is depression). Or I vented it in ways that felt cathartic in the moment but were damaging to my husband and children. I finally asked my therapist to sit on me, to hold me down so I had a force to push against, so I could release a primal scream. It took me decades of this kind of healing work to learn to channel and release my rage so that I could get to the more vulnerable feelings underneath it: the grief and the fear, the soft underbelly the anger was there to protect.
When I forgave Hitler for killing my parents, it had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of me that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding onto that rage, I was in chains with him.
To forgive is to grieve — for what happened, for what didn’t happen–and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is. Of course, it wasn’t acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. But it happened, and I don’t want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.
I don’t have the godly power to anoint anyone with forgiveness, to spiritually cleanse others for their wrongs.
But I have the power to free myself.
This piece includes some excerpted material from Dr. Eger’s books The Choice and The Gift.
