Edith Eger: What the Hell Do We Do With What Happened to Us?

There are people whose stories make you feel like the universe needs to apologize for allowing them to exist. Edith Eva Eger was one of those people. She was sixteen years old when the Nazis deported her and her family to Auschwitz. On the day she arrived, her parents were taken from her and sent to the gas chambers. That same night, Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician, ordered Edith to dance for him. She was a teenage gymnast and ballerina, and in the middle of one of the most horrifying places ever created by human beings, she danced while the man who had just helped murder her parents watched. It is almost impossible to comprehend that sentence, much less the life that followed it. She survived Auschwitz, survived a death march, survived liberation, eventually came to the United States, became a therapist and healer, and spent much of the rest of her life helping other people deal with trauma. Edith Eger died just this spring at the age of 98. The remarkable thing about her story isn't simply that she survived Auschwitz. It is what she decided to do with the fact that she had survived it.

And that's where her story gets really interesting for veterans. Because veterans know something about carrying a past that refuses to stay in the past. You can leave the battlefield. You can leave the deployment. You can leave the unit. You can leave the military. You can move across the country, get married, have kids, get a different job, buy a house, grow a beard, lose the beard, gain forty pounds, lose forty pounds, start drinking too much, stop drinking, start working out, start meditating, go to therapy, refuse to go to therapy, and tell yourself that you're perfectly fucking fine. But your nervous system doesn't necessarily receive the memo. Sometimes the war ends and the war keeps happening inside you. Sometimes the event itself is no longer happening, but your relationship with the event is still happening every damn day. Eger eventually built her life's work around precisely that problem: what happens when the external prison disappears but the internal prison remains?

One of the most powerful ideas associated with Eger is that freedom is not necessarily the ability to change what happened. We can't. That's the brutal part. You don't get to go back to 1944 and save your parents. A veteran doesn't get to go back to the convoy and stop the IED from exploding. You don't get to unhear the radio call, unsee the body, undo the betrayal of your friend, or become the person you were before something happened. The past is an incredibly shitty negotiator. It doesn't care how much you would like a different deal. But Eger argued that there remains a place where freedom can exist: in our response to what happened. Her work became known as “choice therapy,” built around the idea that while we don't always choose what happens to us, we can work toward choosing how we respond to it.

That doesn't mean “just choose happiness.” That's Hallmark-card bullshit, and anybody who has actually experienced serious trauma knows it. Eger's own life makes that interpretation impossible. She didn't skip over Auschwitz by thinking positive thoughts. She carried it for decades. She didn't immediately become some enlightened trauma guru the moment she was liberated. In fact, she kept much of her experience secret for years. She eventually began to study trauma, including working with combat veterans, while still carrying unresolved pieces of her own story. At one point she described feeling like an impostor because she was helping other traumatized people while she herself had not completely confronted what had happened to her.

That part matters enormously. Because veterans sometimes get sold the idea that healing means becoming some perfectly adjusted human being who has finally “put the past behind them.” Fuck that. Maybe healing isn't putting the past behind you. Maybe it's changing your relationship with it. Maybe the goal isn't to erase the scar but to stop letting the scar dictate where you go. Eger eventually returned to Auschwitz decades after the war, confronted the place where so much of her suffering had occurred, and began more fully telling her story. Her bestselling memoir, The Choice, published when she was ninety years old, became a major expression of that journey. Her later books continued the same theme: freedom is possible even when the past cannot be changed.

And there is another idea from Eger that I think veterans should pay particular attention to: you don't have to win the argument with your past before you can live your life. We spend an enormous amount of time trying to solve yesterday. Why did it happen? Why did I do that? Why didn't somebody stop it? Why did he die? Why did I survive? Why did I come home and he didn't? Why did my marriage fall apart? Why can't I just be normal? Why am I still angry? Why am I still afraid? Why can't I sleep? Why the fuck am I still thinking about something that happened twenty years ago? Those questions are understandable. Some of them may even be important. But there comes a point where you realize that your brain can spend the rest of your life interrogating the past without ever actually giving you your life back.

The present moment is where the actual life is happening. That's not some hippie bullshit. It's brutally practical. Right now, you're sitting somewhere. Right now, somebody you love may be standing ten feet away from you. Right now, there is sunlight coming through a window. Right now, there is a dog that needs to be scratched, a kid who needs a hug, a buddy who needs a phone call, a trail that needs walking, a meal that needs eating, or some asshole from your old unit who needs to be reminded that yes, you are still alive. The past matters, but it isn't happening right now. The future matters, but it isn't happening right now either. The only place you can actually make a different choice is here.

This is one reason community can be so powerful for veterans. A good veteran community doesn't demand that you explain your entire psychological history before you're allowed to belong. You don't necessarily have to sit in a fluorescent office and stare at somebody while trying to explain why you haven't been okay since 2007. Sometimes you just need somebody next to you who understands why you don't like crowds. Sometimes you need to walk ten miles with people who don't care if you talk. Sometimes you need to laugh at something completely inappropriate. Sometimes you need to tell the same story for the hundredth time. Sometimes you need somebody to say, “Yeah, me too.” And sometimes you need to get dragged outside wearing silkies because apparently your friends have decided that dignity is no longer a requirement for healing.

There is something deeply irreverent about that, and maybe that's part of the medicine. Trauma tells us to become smaller. It tells us to isolate. It tells us that nobody could possibly understand. It tells us that our story makes us damaged goods. It tells us that we have to hide the ugly parts. And then along comes a bunch of veterans wearing ridiculous shorts, laughing their asses off, talking about things nobody else understands, and suddenly the story changes. You're not the weird unfixable guy hiding in the corner anymore. You're one of the weird healing guys in the group. And that distinction matters. A lot.

Eger also offers something incredibly important for anybody working in veteran healing: suffering does not have to be the end of the story. That does not mean suffering was good. It doesn't mean Auschwitz was somehow necessary to produce the person Edith Eger became. It doesn't mean war is secretly a gift. It doesn't mean trauma always happens for a good reason. We should be very careful with that. Some things cannot be redeemed by finding a sufficiently inspirational interpretation.

But we can decide what we do next.

That's different.

Eger was eventually able to take something that had tried to destroy her and use the knowledge she gained from surviving it to help other people. She didn't make her suffering disappear. She transformed her relationship to it and then used what she learned to serve other people.

And that may be one of the most powerful things a veteran can eventually do. Not because every veteran needs to become a therapist, mentor, nonprofit leader or motivational speaker. Hell no. Sometimes healing means simply getting your own life back. But there can come a point where the question changes from “Why did this happen to me?” to “What can I do with what happened to me?” That's a very different question. One keeps you staring backward. The other turns your body toward the future.

Maybe your suffering taught you something about loneliness. Maybe that means you notice the guy standing alone at the edge of the party. Maybe you know what it feels like to be afraid to ask for help, so you become the person who asks somebody else first. Maybe you know what addiction feels like, so you recognize it in another veteran before anybody else does. Maybe you've buried people and learned how precious an ordinary Tuesday afternoon actually is. Maybe you've spent years believing you were broken and eventually realized that you were injured. Maybe you learned that the person you were before the military isn't coming back… and that doesn't necessarily mean you can't become someone new.

That's a hell of a distinction.

And Eger's story also challenges one of the most destructive ideas in the veteran world: that there is some hierarchy of suffering. The guy who lost his leg gets to be traumatized. The guy who was shot gets to be traumatized. The guy who spent twelve months behind a desk in Germany after his wife left him for another man is supposed to shut the fuck up because “other people had it worse.” Eger pushed back against precisely that kind of comparison. Suffering isn't a competition. You don't have to win the Trauma Olympics to deserve healing. That is important because veterans are exceptionally good at minimizing their own pain. We learned it in the military. Somebody else always had it worse. Somebody else was more fucked up. Somebody else got shot. Somebody else lost more people. Somebody else was in a worse unit. Somebody else had a harder deployment. Somebody else was betrayed or cheated on more. So we shut up. We suck it up. We keep moving. And eventually “I'm fine” becomes less of a statement and more of a damn prideful religion.

Eger's life suggests another possibility: you can acknowledge what happened without allowing it to become your identity. She was a victim of something monstrous. But she refused to spend the rest of her life understanding herself only through that victimhood. She became a therapist. A mother. An author. A teacher. A survivor. A person who helped other people. She became someone whose life was much larger than the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

And maybe that's what veteran healing is ultimately about. Not forgetting. Not pretending. Not forcing forgiveness. Not turning every traumatic experience into some cheesy inspirational story.

Maybe it's simply this: the worst thing that happened to you does not get to be the only thing that happens to you.

You are still here.

There is still today.

There are still people you haven't met.

There are still places you haven't gone.

There are still jokes you haven't heard.

There are still stupid things you're going to laugh at.

There are still people who need you.

There are still people who can love you.

There are still trails you haven't walked.

There are still stories you haven't told.

And there may eventually be somebody standing in front of you who is exactly where you once were… and you might be the person who says the one thing they desperately need to hear: “Yeah. I've been there. Come with me.”

That, more than anything, may be the legacy of Edith Eva Eger.

She survived something that should have destroyed her. She spent decades learning how to live with what happened. And then she spent the rest of her life helping other people discover that their suffering didn't have to be the end of their story.

For veterans, that's a pretty damn powerful lesson.

Because maybe the mission isn't to become who you were before.

Maybe the mission is to become who you can be now.

And maybe the first step is ridiculously simple:

Get out of your head. Get into the present. Find your people. And take the next fucking step.

Semper Silkies. Always Healing.