Dr. Edith Eva Eger – Author Biography
Early Life
Edith Eva Eger was born on September 29, 1927, in Košice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), into a Hungarian Jewish family. A gifted ballet dancer and gymnast, she trained for the Olympics as a teenager. In 1944, at sixteen, she was deported with her family to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered on arrival. She survived the camp — forced at one point to dance for Josef Mengele — and then a death march to Austria, where American soldiers found her barely alive in a pile of corpses.
Career
After the war, Eger married, emigrated to the United States in 1949, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso. She became a therapist specializing in PTSD, working with veterans, abused women, and trauma survivors — drawing on both her training and her own experience. At 90, she published her memoir, The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017), which interweaves her Holocaust story with the lessons of her therapy practice. Its follow-up, The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (2020), distilled her therapeutic wisdom. She continues to speak and teach internationally.
Major Works
The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017) and The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (2020).
Writing Style and Themes
Eger writes with the warmth of a therapist and the authority of a survivor. Her central message: we are all imprisoned by our own minds — by victimhood, guilt, grief — and we hold the key. She blends memoir with case studies from her practice, showing how the lessons of Auschwitz apply to ordinary suffering. Her themes are forgiveness (including self-forgiveness), choice, resilience, and the refusal to let the past define the future.
Legacy
The Choice became an international bestseller and is frequently compared to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning — Eger even studied under Frankl’s influence. At an age when most people have long retired, she became one of the world’s most sought-after voices on trauma and healing.
