l:45-3:05 pm Sunday, January l6, 2005 - Congregation Beth Israel
Edith Eva Eger, Ph.D. - "The Story of My Experience As a Holocaust Survivor: From Victimization to Empowerment"
Professor Randy Sturman - "Law, Narratives Through Medicine and the Holocaust: The Influence of the Holocaust on End-of-Life Decisions in Israel"
Lou Dunst - "The Story of a Holocaust Survivor in Auschwitz, Matthausen, and My Near Escape from Death"
Merle Fischlowitz, Ph. D. - "Poems about the Holocaust: A Reading"

World-renowned psychologist and motivational speaker Edith Eger recently returned from celebrating her son-in-law Robert Engle's 2003 Novel Prize for Economics. "This, too," she smiles triumphantly, "is posthumous revenge against Hitler."

It was 59 years ago this month that among a huge pile of corpses, a small hand moved slightly from beneath the rotting carnage. A U.S. soldier investigated and discovered the hand was attached to the 40-pound unconscious body of a teenager. Barely 17 years old, this tortured daughter of murdered parents was transferred to a hospital in Czechoslovakia. There she was treated for a broken back and other injuries - and fell in love with a Czech freedom fighter hospitalized for tuberculosis. While she was still in a cast, new life was conceived. Doctors advised her to terminate the pregnancy. "They told me I was too weak to ever carry a child," she recalls. But after spending a year surrounded by death, the life force rose triumphant from the ashes. In 1947, Marianne was born. Today, Marianne Engle is a prominent psychologist and a professor at New York University who dined in Stockholm last December with the Swedish Royal Family at the Novel Laureate Banquet.

The ballet and gymnastic lessons Edith Eger began at age four became her ticket to survival. Upon arrival in Auschwitz on the same transport as Elie Wiesel, Dr. Mengele immediately sent her parents to the gas chambers. He kept their daughter barely alive as a subject for his notorious medical experiments - and for his own amusement. She had trained to be a concert ballerina. Rather than performing in grand halls throughout Europe as she had once dreamed, the emaciated teenager from Kassa, Hungary, instead performed pirouettes and cartwheels to entertain Mengele and his murderous minions.

Although the Nazis decimated her family and physically broke her back, Edith Eger left Europe penniless - too proud to apply for reparation funds from the German government - but otherwise intact. When she, her husband and 2-year-old Marianne arrived in New York, they lived in the Bronx with an aunt who warned them not to mention the Holocaust. In those days, having been in a concentration camp was a badge of shame. When they moved to Baltimore where her sister was living, Edith did piecework in a factory. There she deliberately used the "Colored" bathroom.

Eventually, the Eger family (another daughter and son were born in the U.S.) moved to Texas where Edith's formal education resulted in a doctorate degree in psychology while her husband became a C.P.A.

Twice-widowed, Eger lived in La Jolla where she has an active psychotherapy practice and a UCSD faculty appointment. She is a prolific contributor to "Chocolate For Women's Soul" and "Chicken Soup For the Golden Soul." She accepts invitations throughout the world as an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker on "How to Be Transformed By Adversity." She is schooled in Logotherapy - psychotherapy based on a search for meaning in life - and was a keynote speaker at the late Logotherapy found Viktor Frankl's 90th birthday celebration. She has described as a cross between Doctor Ruth and Joan Rivers. When she works with children victims of bullies, she likes to be called "Grandma Edie."

According to Eger's daughter, Marianne Engle, her mother has always been a women people instinctly trust. "Like a true survivor, she always takes the best from the past and uses it to enrich the future," says Engle, who describes her father's pride when her mother received a standing ovation from top-level U.S. Army officers she addressed at Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountaintop hideaway at Berchtesgarten.

Because she so readily identifies with the underdog, Edith Eger has devoted her life to freedom fighting. (Freedom from fear, from anger and from unresolved grief, she says.) Eger marched with martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and joined with Tibetans in a march to free Tibet. In 1985, she was invited to New Zealand by then Prime Minister David Russell Lange as a keynote speaker to honor Righteous Gentiles and she ahs spoken to the families of the victims of the Murrach Building bombing in Oklahoma City. And of course she's been Oprah's guest. As a resiliency expert she maintains that Auschwitz was the school that taught her everything she needed to know about life, about survival. "There was no Prozac in Auschwitz," she murmurs softly.

It was the guild of surviving the Nazi atrocities, she thinks, that has driven her to be a high achiever. Why did I survive when others didn't? There must have been a reason.

Although she was an overachiever professionally, the physic healing began only when she revisited her old alma mater, Auschwitz. "I wanted to look for the barracks where I danced for Mengele," she says quietly. When she visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and recognized her own photo, the internal healing process advanced. It only took 40 years.

In her mid-70s, the petite blonde grandmother of five fills the room with her charisma and warmth. Meticulously groomed and coifed, appearing almost coquettish in bright red pants, gold sandals and a Versace overblouse with silkscreened Marilyn Monroe and James Dean images, this gracious doyenne of frequent Sunday morning brunches fills exquisite vases with fresh calla lilies from her garden while kielbasa, lox and bagels, omelets, latkes and apricot brandy beckon. "Eat, children eat!" Eager urges her middle-aged brunch guests in a charming Hungarian accent. Serene Juan O'Gorman painting and bronze, porcelain and unidentified metal figures of ballerinas abound amid a stunning panoramic of the Pacific. She's concerned, she tells her guests, that her travels take too much time away from her practice.

A consummate storyteller, her tales end with aphorisms. The goal, she says, is not to overcome but to come to terms with the 'cherished wound,' "The biggest concentration camp is in your own mind," Eger says softly but with conviction. "Healing is a lifelong journey."

Since her graduation from the School of Auschwitz in May 1945, Eger has been on a lifelong inner journey from victim to heroine. By living her life fully, successfully, passionately and emphatically, she has turned adversity into advantage and is continually showing the way for others on the path.

What does Edith Eger want carved on her tombstone. 'I NEVER SAID IT WAS EASY," she laughs.