Edith Eva Eger, a Hungarian-born American clinical psychologist, renowned researcher of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Holocaust survivor, and author, has died at the age of 98 on Tuesday, her publisher Open Books told MTI.
Edith Eva Eger was born in 1927 and spent her childhood in Košice, where she was a talented ballerina and gymnast and even a member of the Olympic team until anti-Jewish laws forced her out. In the spring of 1944, at the age of 16, she and her family were confined to the Košice ghetto and deported to Auschwitz in May. According to the publisher’s statement, her parents were sent to the gas chamber by Josef Mengele on the day of their arrival, while she was forced to dance for him in order to survive. Along with her sister Magda, she endured several concentration camps before being liberated in the Gunskirchen camp by American soldiers in the spring of 1945.
After the war, she met her future husband, Béla Eger, also a survivor. In 1949, they emigrated to the United States to escape the communist regime and settled in Texas. Edith Eva Eger spent decades working through her own trauma. As an adult, she pursued higher education, studying psychology and earning her degree, followed by a PhD in clinical psychology in 1978 from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She practiced for decades in La Jolla, California, and also taught at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Although she was a respected therapist in her field, she gained widespread international recognition later in life through her books, written with encouragement from psychologist Philip Zimbardo. In her works, she combined her personal life story with therapeutic case studies to explore post-traumatic growth and the power of forgiveness.
Her best-known book, The Choice (2017), is an autobiographical work describing the horrors of concentration camps and her decades-long journey toward inner freedom. This was followed by The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (2020), and in 2024, The Ballerina, a memoir aimed at younger generations, focusing on her experiences in Auschwitz as a teenage girl and the power of resilience.
(MTI)
Photo: Edith Eva Eger’s official Facebook page
