Review

This memoir by the internationally acclaimed psychologist Dr. Edith Eger is a real winner and a memorable read. Dr. Eger, now age 92, is one of the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust. She and her Hungarian Jewish family were taken to Auschwitz when she was 16 and her mother and father were killed there on day one. Toward the end of the war, she and her sister, Magda, were transferred from Auschwitz to Gunskirchen (Austria), at which time she weighed 70 pounds. When the Americans arrived, Edith was rescued by an American soldier when he pulled her from a pile of corpses. The book is divided into four sections: Prison, Escape, Freedom, and Healing. The last two sections are about her efforts to shake the trauma, escape the prison of her own mind, and undo the grip of her horrible experience, allowing her to get on with her life. At one point in her studies she is given a copy of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning from which she found permission to fully address the torment of her experience. She later met Frankl, who became a mentor and a friend until he died in 1997. Dr. Eger completes her undergraduate studies, her Master's program and her doctorate, and builds a private practice, telling of her personal journey along with moving stories about her patients. In his Foreword to this memoir, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford, notes that, although her life has been full of darkness, she preserved her mental and spiritual freedom and is now able to help others to heal since she has successfully journeyed from trauma to triumph herself. Dr. Zimbardo asked her to give a guest lecture to his Psychology of Mind Control class at Stanford and at the close of her talk, every one of his some 300 students leapt into a spontaneous standing ovation and over 100 of them flooded the stage to embrace Dr. Eger. He notes that her goal is always to inspire us, "to help each of us to escape the prisons of our own minds." We all have a choice. All readers will relish this read and psychologists and would-be-psychologists will find her memoir of particular importance and value.

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