Edith Eva Eger, a 94-year-old psychotherapist born in Hungary who survived the concentration camps, offered several practical pieces of advice.

In 1944 the sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz together with her family. Just hours after her parents were killed, the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele made Edith dance for his own amusement and for her survival.

Edith and her sister lived through all the horrors of Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Gunskirchen — the death camps.

On 4 May 1945 Edith, barely alive, was pulled out from under a pile of corpses.

Torture, hunger and the constant threat of death did not break Edith, and her inner world helped her find a life-affirming strength and freedom of spirit.

Thirty-five years after the end of the war, having become a well-known psychologist, Edith returned to Auschwitz in order to let go of the memories of the past and of survivor’s guilt.

Edith said that yes, it seemed she had no choice in the camp. But the choice was in her head.

She even wrote a book about it, “The Choice”.

There are no problems, there are challenges,

there is no crisis, there is change.

All the strength is already inside every person.

Edith Eva Eger noted that all we have right now is one another.

She said that words may seem less powerful than weapons, but it was words that helped her in Auschwitz.

If you can survive today, tomorrow you will be free.

The choice is ours

We can choose what horror teaches us.

To become embittered by grief and fear?

Hostile?

Numb?

Or to hold on to something childlike in us, alive and curious — to that part of us which is innocent.

We have a choice: to pay attention to what we have lost, or to what we have.

Escaping from your own prison

What we refuse to accept becomes something like brick walls with a reinforced concrete frame, from which there is no breaking out.

When we do not allow ourselves to grieve our losses, our wounds and our lost hopes, we are doomed to live through them again and again.

Freedom begins when we learn to accept what has happened.

Freedom means that we gather the courage to take our prison apart — brick by brick.