Holocaust Survivor Dr. Edith Eger on the Gift of Forgiveness

On today’s special episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to Dr. Edith Eger about her book The Choice: Embrace the Possible which details her time at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the importance of feeling traumatic experiences in an effort to heal them, how suffering should lead us to strength rather than victimization, why forgiveness is a gift that you must choose to give to yourself, and more. A native of Hungary, Edith Eva Eger was just a teenager in 1944 when she experienced one of the worst evils the human race has ever known. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, the heinous death camp. Her parents were sent to the gas chambers but Edith’s bravery kept her and her sister alive. Dr. Eger is a practicing psychologist and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. She is also the author of the bestselling memoir The Choice: Embrace the Possible and The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life. Beekeeper’s Naturals is the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B. LXR. For just $5 shipping, you can get a two-week supply of B. Immune Propolis Throat Spray for FREE. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. And when your life insurance policy is sorted out, you’ll know that your family will be protected if anything happens. Just go to policygenius.com to get started.***Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Dr. Eger:Homepage: https://dreditheger.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dredithegerTwitter: https://twitter.com/dreditheger1/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.editheger/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone who, we'll call them a late bloomer, but their long germination is to the benefit of all of humanity. I'm talking about Dr. Edith Eger, the author of this wonderful book, The Choice: Embrace the Possible. She was born in 1927 to Hungarian Jewish parents. And if you understand your history, it won't surprise you to hear that she survives the Holocaust and then flees Hungarian communism after she survives, ends up in El Paso, Texas, is a mother. And it's only at age 50 that she goes back to school

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  to become a clinical psychologist. She's introduced to the work of Dr. Viktor Frankl, who we talk about here a lot on the podcast, Man's Search for Meaning, Yes to Life, one of the founders of logotherapy.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  But Dr. Eger's book is incredibly moving, incredibly inspiring. What she's saying, her choice, is actually at the root of Stoicism as well. She talks about Epictetus in today's interview. Epictetus says, "We don't control what happens, but we choose how we respond." Her book is all about how you respond to the trauma, to the pain, to the suffering, to the difficulty, as well as the good luck and the fortune and the joy that life provides you. You choose how you respond. Please read The Choice. I sell this in the Painted Porch because it's one of my all-time favorite books. Her new book, The Gift, I just ordered. I'm very excited about. Her TED Talk is also incredible.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  It was truly an honor to do this interview with Dr. Edith Eger. Please read this book. And I think it's extra urgent today, given the rise in antisemitism. That's why we have to care about people. That's why we have to stand up for people, even when we disagree with them. Why we have to protect the vulnerable. Why we can't allow violence and discrimination and hatred to run rampant. Why we have to always love, always accept, always protect, always preserve. They've done studies recently on how many young people have even heard of the Holocaust? How many young people even know that it happened? One of the worst things that humans have ever done to each other.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps the worst thing that humans have ever done to each other. And it's already slipping from our collective memory because we don't want to think about it. We don't want it to be true. We want to talk about what's pleasant. We want to talk about what's current. And what we risk tragically is repeating history. And this is a thing that, as she closed our interview with, something like the Holocaust can never be allowed to happen again. And as Marcus Aurelius says, "We commit injustice when we allow injustice to happen." You can commit injustice, he says, "by doing nothing." I firmly believe that. And that's why we have to choose, as the book says, we have to choose to be good, choose to be great, choose to follow that Stoic virtue.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  And this interview should hopefully help give you some clarity there. So here's my interview with Dr. Edith Eger.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  I have so much stuff I wanted to ask you. One of my favorite parts in The Choice, you talk about your son, who was born with some disabilities, but you have this conversation with you and the doctor where he tells you that your son is going to be whatever you make him into being, and that if you push him too hard, it's a problem. But if you don't push him enough, it's a problem.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so brilliantly. Oh, you are so brilliant. I love you. I love you. You're adopted.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm curious then, given what you experienced, how did that shape your parenting strategies? I imagine you would have two impulses. One, you would want to hold them close and never let them feel even the slightest bit of pain. And on the other, it might make you, I don't want to say insensitive, but it could be hard to calibrate what's normal and healthy, given what you witnessed and what you experienced. How did you think about that?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you that this is a country of second opinion. And I was told in Texas that my son may never make it to high school, and I better look for a school for retarded. We don't use that word anymore. And that's when I asked, where do I get a second opinion? So I arrived in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, and a Dr. Clark, beautiful neurologist, told me, give me your son for a week. And that's what I did and came back a week later. And he sat me down and he said, your son is not retarded. He's got the bedroom eyes.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  He's got clumsiness and everything that comes with it. But he's going to be what you make of him. And that's when I began to shake. Me? And he says he's going to need speech therapy, occupational therapy, this, this, this, and the other. And...

• 6:30Speaker 01

  How do I pay you? He says, "Give me $10." This is in 1916. I dropped out of school and my son John graduated as a top student, top 10 students, not 10%, top 10 students from the University of Texas. If you go to the University of Texas, my name, John Eger, is there. He is my hero. He was born in 1956. He also picked up a illness called sarcoidosis when he was with his father

• 7:14Speaker 01

  revisiting Czechoslovakia.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  That's where my grandfather's from.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Really?

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  From Kocice, Kocia?

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know exactly. He wasn't Jewish, but he ended up in a displaced persons camp all the same and he immigrated here and met my grandmother.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  You come from good blood, good survivor. Do you eat the food called trapanka, called halushki?

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  I remember eating a lot of sausage. We ate a lot of sausage.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Lot of sausage, exactly. Yeah, Hungarians have very good sausage, too. And are you the firstborn child?

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  I'm the oldest, yes. I have one younger sister.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dranara, Nobel Prize winners, very responsible. And if you marry a firstborn, you're gonna have two bosses and you may have some power struggle.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  I married a youngest child, so we balance each other out.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  That's right. You did well. You know how we call the youngest child?

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  What?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Charming manipulator.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  That's exactly... I would say, with all kindness, that is a great description of my wife.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So, never argue with her.

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So, I had an interesting question. So, I've...

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  I'm fascinated. So you were born in 1927. Have you thought about who the oldest person you met as a child was? So like, I'm fascinated with how far back in history your life connects with. Does that make sense?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yes, and the person is the wife of President Roosevelt.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, Eleanor Roosevelt. You met Eleanor Roosevelt?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Eleanor Roosevelt, just a little bit. But anything I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn about the woman who created her own identity and not bothered being jealous of her wife or anything like that. She became my hero. She still is.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  So she was born in 1884. So that's incredible. So and she obviously met Theodore Roosevelt. And so I'm just fascinated with the way that lives touch other lives and how history is a thread of people shaking hands with each other from different periods, different experiences.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Beautiful, beautiful. I also know Tova, who did Eleanor Roosevelt on Broadway. And she did a beautiful job, beautiful, a one-woman show many, many years ago. And now she's doing Dr. Ruth. And she's up there now with Dr. Ruth in New York. And some people call me the mix between Dr. Ruth and Joan Rivers because I tell people to grow up. Go grow up, you know? I want to tell them, you want to be a baby or a big girl?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Because when you're a baby, you sit in the back of the car and you mess around and someone is driving the car. You want freedom, no responsibility. But now... Do you want to be driven or do you want to be the driver?

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  So let me ask, is, was part of what inspired you about Eleanor Roosevelt? Was that she, like you, was, was what we would call a late bloomer? You know, she really didn't hit her stride as an activist. Yes, she was FDR's wife, but I would almost argue that her impact as a public figure began after his polio diagnosis. She, which I don't know how old she was, but I'd argue probably around 50 years old.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am a late bloomer too. When I was 40, my supervisor asked me to go get a doctorate and I told him it's impossible. By the time I get it, I'm gonna be 50 and he said, you'll be 50 anyway. So I tell women now, maybe you want to go to law school because mothers make very good lawyers, very good judges and go, go, go, go, go, go back to school. Yes.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you're, you're certainly the, the oldest person that I've had the privilege of talking to Zoom on, so this is quite a treat for me.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I am older, but not old.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  Could you have imagined, could you have imagined as a young girl that this technology would exist? I mean, isn't this incredible?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Never ever imagined that I would ever be in 93 as young as I am today. It's all about your attitude and it's all about, numbers will happen anyway. Mothers, you know, the chronological numbers doesn't bother me at all. I'll be 94 in September and I feel very, very much alive and I hope to, I hope to be alive for a while and writing another book with my daughter and on recipes and hopefully that's

• 12:56Speaker 01

  going to be also a recipe for schoolchildren so they would really take education seriously.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca famously said that far too many old people have nothing to show for their years but their age. I think what's incredible about you is not that you're 93, but that at 93, you have experienced what you've experienced. Your life has had many seasons of experiences.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I'm a much of a Renaissance woman, and I think women can do that. And the later in life, the better, because they can really pick and choose the attitude that you are going to work with, whether they're going to stop doing one thing or give up one thing. But when you give up anything, you have to replace it with something else. So you have to really check out your priorities in life and think about your thinking, because what you think, you create.

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  That idea of thinking about your thinking, that's sort of the core of Stoic philosophy, which I talk about. It's also the core of Buddhism. But it also strikes me that what you talk about in The Choice is really thinking about what you're thinking, that even something as terrible as Auschwitz, you have the ability to determine what you think about it. You might be powerless in that you're there, but you can decide what it means to you.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  It is very important for me to tell you that I found love and God in Auschwitz, because I was able to look at the guards, that they were more in prison than I was, that they were brainwashed. They were brainwashed to look at me and calling me, they're calling me cancer to society. And I was told in Auschwitz, I'm never going to get out of here alive. And I was able to turn hate to pity and feeling sorry for the guards, that they would have

• 15:21Speaker 01

  a conscience and they would have to pay for what they're doing now, putting children into the oven without even gassing them.

• 15:30Ryan Holiday?

  But that doesn't come naturally, right? You have to really work to get yourself there, or is that how your disposition just is?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I think I wanted to live so badly. And I was in love. I was in love, you see? And he told me I have beautiful eyes and I have beautiful hands. So, you know, in the Kedra car, my mom told me, and I quote that all the time when I go to school. My mom told me, "We don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind." So that's why I tell young children to please stay in school, even though,

• 16:23Speaker 01

  you know, God gave us temptation. You know, I'm really tempted to eat up the whole Hungarian chocolate cake, but I have to learn to be a good mommy to me. Because dependency breeds depression. There was no mommy there for me. I had to learn, is what my believing master told me, that look at God from inside out. And I learned to change my thinking and never, never even imagine that I am not gonna get out of here.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  When I get out of here, I'm gonna see my boyfriend. When I get out of here, I'll show him my eyes, my hands. You know, when I get out of here, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow is where I was always. Tomorrow was really, truly a wonderful friend to me.

• 17:27Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 17:35Ryan Holiday?

  Are you familiar with James Stockdale, the prisoner of war in Vietnam?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Maybe not.

• 17:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and he studied Stoicism. And so he was thinking of the work of Epictetus there as he was being tortured. And I'd be curious what your take on this is, because what he was saying, and obviously, not having experienced it, I have no idea. But he was saying that there's this tension, because, he said, the optimists were the ones that didn't make it out. Because the optimist always thought, "I'm going to be home by Christmas. I'm going to be home by summer." And it never happened. So he said, "You can't be an optimist. You have to be a realist. But at the same time, you have to have this unflinching belief that you are going to survive. And if you do, you will turn this into

• 18:26Ryan Holiday?

  the best thing that ever happened to you."

• 18:28Speaker 01

  See, I had two Vietnam veterans. It's in my tattoo.

• 18:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  So one of them was in a kind of a fetal position. "Why me? Why me? Cursing God, country, you name it." And then the other one, it was just the most amazing, complete and thetis of this one, and told me, "Hey, Doc, I'm sitting in a wheelchair, and I can see my children's eyes much closer. And I can also see the flowers. And I'm sitting there with a white coat, a lab coat,

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Dr. Eger, Department of Psychiatry. And I feel like the biggest..." Impostor. Impostor. Because I went to school, I went to school, I went to school, and made me realize that I cannot take them further than I have gone myself.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And that's when I decided to go back to Auschwitz. I wish I could meet those two Vietnam veterans. That I decided to go back to the lions, then look at the lion in her face. And I went to my sister, and I asked her to come with me. And she told me I'm an idiot. And not only an idiot, but also I am a masochist. That what do I want to do when I'm already in America and I can be a good Yankee Doodle Dandy? And believe me, that's the work I do today,

• 20:25Speaker 01

  because you can't heal what you don't feel.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  So don't medicate, don't medicate, grieve. And I'm so privileged to teach at the university the wonderful psychiatric people who are not medicating, grieve. But I also can tell you that I also worked with a wonderful girl from Yugoslavia. And together, we were keeping each other alive. But she told me that we're going to be liberated by Christmas. And Christmas came.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  And she died the next day. That kind of rigid thinking, all or nothing, didn't work at all. But I knew who was going to die. I had this ability to look at the eyes, to look at the face of people who just gradually gave up.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Gave up. Or they even touched the board wire and they got electrocuted. Or they touched the guard and they were shot. You know, they took my blood.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And one time they asked me about getting my arm so they can take my blood. And I asked, "Why are you taking my blood?" And he said, "To aid the German soldiers." I spoke German fluently. "And to aid the Germans so we can win the war and take over the world, especially America." So I couldn't yank my arm away. But you know what I said to myself? "You are the stupidest." Because I was a ballerina.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  And I, you know? And so I never allowed them to get to me.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And people say, "You make me angry." Nobody makes me angry. People have as much anger or whatever, any feelings. I do not allow people

• 23:01Speaker 01

  to ever murder my spirit.

• 23:04Ryan Holiday?

  My wife says that. She says, "I've said, 'You're frustrating me.'" And she said, "I can't make you frustrated. That's all on you."

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have an anxiety. And no, you don't. You're thinking anxiously and yet, yes, Epictetus was certainly right. That is not what's happening. It's what you do with it.

• 23:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, he writes, he said, "Today I escaped anxiety." And he says, "No, I discarded it because it was inside me. I let it go." And I think that's a beautiful way to say it.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  That's what I say, that revenge gives you very temporary satisfaction. But forgiveness is the freedom, is the gift that I choose to give to myself.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And I think that is a big, big difference. That I am not a victim. I was not at all, ever, at here to be a victim. I was victimized. It's not who I am. It's not my identity. It's what was done to me. And I think there is a big difference. I refuse to be a victim. It's not who I am. It's not my identity.

• 24:25Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let me ask you about the forgiveness thing. Because this is something I'm struggling with. Obviously, it's not at the scale of what happened in the middle of the 20th century. But I was talking to a friend about this. It's been hard for me. You know, in America, COVID-19, this horrendous pandemic. In one sense, it was unpreventable. And then another sense, the immense proportion of the tragedy was preventable. Because human beings, people we both, we all know, you know, declined to take it seriously, declined to think about their obligations to each other. I'm having a little bit of trouble going back to life

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  and being able to forget, you know, that certain people couldn't wear a mask or certain people didn't want to follow protocols or certain people said, you know, I'm young, this doesn't affect me. This is, you know, it's only old people that are dying. You know, how do you, how do you forgive and forget the immense callousness and selfishness that human beings are capable of?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  No, I never forget what happened. But I'd like you to maybe pick up a book, that you may have it in your place, by Max Weber. By Max Weber. Capitalism and the Protestant Ethics.

• 25:57Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  And he refers to the Jewish people as pariah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Jew's out of the pariah. See, what happened, Germany didn't win the war. And anytime a country suffers economically, they have to have a scapegoat.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Carter, you know, let's go kill Carter. That's what happened, you know, in Iran. But I think it's very, very important to know that while you blame, you're still a child. Children blame. You made me angry. You did this to me. No, 4 o'clock in the morning in Auschwitz, I didn't know what's going to happen next. I didn't know whether I'm going to end up in a gas chamber. I didn't know. And that's a very difficult place to be, that you don't know what's going to happen next. We didn't know when we took a shower, whether gas or water is going to come out.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. But I knew that I'm going to do everything possible to take care of my sister.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And all we had was each other then. So you had to go beyond the me, me, me and commit ourselves to each other and form a family of inmates. All we had was each other then, and all we have is each other now.

• 27:31Ryan Holiday?

  So when you come out of Auschwitz and you go back to your life, and then your life is disrupted again by the sort of tyranny of communism, how, I guess I'm just curious, how do you not carry resentment or anger, not just at the perpetrators, but at the bystanders or the indifferent population that allowed something like this to happen? I guess that's what I'm struggling with.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, there is no forgiveness without rage. You've got to go through the valley of the shadow of death, but don't get stuck in there. Some people are chronically angry because the anger somehow keeps them from really facing.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  And go through that pain, but not to get stuck in there, not to be a victim. So you're in a dark tunnel, but you're going towards the light, that you have to have an arrow that you follow. No, no, no, don't cover garlic with chocolate. It doesn't taste good. You know, don't try to forget things as I did. I went totally underground when I came to America because I didn't want to be a weirdo. I felt like a weirdo anyway. So if you ask me, who are you? And I would say, who do you want to be? I think I became a very successful schizophrenic.

• 29:05Ryan Holiday?

  And you tell a story about meeting one of the guards, right afterwards, and the feeling of love that you experienced when you held their hands. That just, that struck me as almost superhuman.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And that was actually Corritain Boon, who met the guy who was responsible for her sister's death. And that's where I learned about forgiveness. From Corritain Boon, she's my hero. The Hiding Place, you may have her book there. And I think that it's very, very important not to run from the past or forget it or fight it, but recognize, no matter what happened, I made it. I was very suicidal after I was liberated. I was lying in a cast. I could hardly breathe.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And I realized the parents are not coming back. My boyfriend was killed a day before liberation. It's important to be realistic rather than idealistic. Because when the idealist doesn't get what they're looking for, they can become very sarcastic, very cynical. The Hungarians can be very cynical, very sarcastic. I like philosophical humor, not sarcasm or cynicism.

• 30:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, General Mattis says that cynicism is cowardice, which I think is a beautiful way of expressing it. It's a way, it's a mechanism to hide from life.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's well said, very well said. So you read a lot of books, the books that you carry?

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  That's beautiful, that's lovely, that's lovely. You really are, are maybe wondering, well, what is my truth?

• 31:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, my grandmother gave me a copy of Viktor Frankl's A Man's Search for Meaning as a young man, and that book opened my eyes as it did for you. And I'm just curious about what your experiences with him were like.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  My experience with him was wonderful. When I met him, he told me to meet him in San Diego at the International University. And this was the time when I was studying myself philosophies. And then my daughter was with me, and as she spoke with the philosophers, I said to my daughter, it's funny, he is not mentioning Kirkegaard. Not that I gave a damn about Kirkegaard, but you know what happened afterwards?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  I thought I had a pope with me, but the pope was insecure. He wanted to know whether he made any mistake. And I, I said, no, it was lovely. And my daughter said, remember, Mom, you said that I wanted to kill my daughter. I'm gonna kick her under the, that German mentality that you have to do everything right. Imagine, I didn't give a damn about Kirkegaard. Here I am with the pope, and little me, Viktor Frankl.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  So that's my first experience. And he actually, I am in one or two books too, that I became truly a very, very ambitious logotherapist. I am a diplomat in logotherapy. And I did a keynote address on his 90th birthday. And I can tell you that Viktor Frankl has a great deal to do with where I am today, with me and my voice. That he guided me to go back to that lion's den

• 33:37Speaker 01

  and look at the lion in a faith and reclaim my innocence. So when I went back and I was ready to come out, I saw a man with a uniform. And for a moment, I thought, I'm in a camp with a Nazi. And the realization that I had a blue American passport in my pocket. That was an amazing experience, that I'm not Popeye. I am me, and it's okay to speak English with an accent. And I don't have to give up my true self

• 34:22Speaker 01

  for some kind of a formula that actually was the best thing I ever done. And that's what I do in my work now. You revisit the places where you've been. We go through the grieving, feeling, and healing. You cannot heal what you don't feel.

• 34:42Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 34:49Ryan Holiday?

  How does that work? Because today it seems like there's a lot of focus on, you know, trigger warnings and safe spaces and trying to protect people from pain. I'm not discounting their trauma, but it seems to be that our response is, if you have trauma, there's something wrong with you. And now we have to be very sensitive or you will break. That seems the opposite of what you and Dr. Frankel were talking about.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Monsieur, I think that I will tell you, the more you suffer, the stronger you become, because it's much easier to die than to live. And I was very suicidal after I was liberated. Not while I was there, but when I realized my parents are not coming back, the reality hit me. And I, I know, I know, I know that some voice was talking to me and told me that if I die, I will never find out what happens. And it's better to be for something than against something.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And that's how I joined the healing arts profession. Healing is different from curing. So the doctors and I work together and they do the curing and realize that some people need medication because they have something too much of or too little of. And it's very important to have a very good physical, to have a good, good, good testing of everything from top to toe, because talking therapy is not enough many times.

• 36:40Ryan Holiday?

  I think that the thing that struck me most about Man's Search for Meaning was he has this paragraph in the book where he says, you know, we ask, what is the meaning of life? And he says, that's wrong. Life is asking us what meaning we are going to create with our actions.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  And not only that, but I think that it's not that you can buy, it's a discovery.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And I like to call Auschwitz as an opportunity to discover the part in you that no Nazi could touch, my spirit.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  They could throw me in a gas chamber any minute. I had no control over the external.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  But I could never touch the spirit that I bring you. That somehow I found hope in hopelessness. And there is a gift in the COVID. Don't go back, have a new beginning.

• 37:52Ryan Holiday?

  People say they want things to go back to normal. And normal is what caused this. It shouldn't go back to normal. That would be a rejection of the meaning of the suffering that all these people experienced, ourselves included.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  No normal, no, there is no such thing. Don't go back, have a new beginning. And especially if you are in a marriage, you may be able to tell your husband that

• 38:22Speaker 01

  you would like to go back to school. You know, because when I told my husband, I want to go back to school and get a doctorate. He said, I don't want to be introduced as Mr. and Doctor.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  You see? But you know, I didn't listen to my husband. You got a risk. You got a risk. And it's okay. It's okay, because I'm not a people pleaser anymore. There is something in me. And that's what happened, you know? When we fled to Vienna and we were going to join the train to go to Israel, where we put everything there, clothes for my daughter for five years and everything. And I had a friend in Israel who told me not to come to Israel now.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Because they are in a desert. And if I had the opportunity to go to America, and that's what I told my husband. And he went out to the train station. They called his name. And he came back. And that's how I came to America in 1949. And let everything go. And we came totally penniless. I came to America and didn't have $6 to get off the boat. And the Red Cross gave me $6. And you can go to the William Boomerang Army Medical Center and see how much money I gave.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Not money, but the time I gave for the $6 that they gave me when I came to America. So I don't owe anything to anyone. I always pay my bills right away. And I think it's very, very important to discover the real you.

• 40:30Ryan Holiday?

  And I think when you're discovering the real you, one of the things that was most moving to me in the book was, I believe you met like a white supremacist or a racist or something. And you were talking about trying to find your shared humanity with that person and discovering that you yourself, a victim of so much hatred and discrimination, that you had to find the bigot inside you because we all have one.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. You know, I had this 14-year-old. And he told me in Texas, he's a boot boy. And I know nothing about boots, of course. And I just acknowledged it. But then he got up and he took his elbow. And he said, hey, Doc, it's time for America to be white again. And I'm gonna kill all the Jews and all the N-word and all the chinkos, you know, in a Texas accent. All the chinkos and all the mascots. All the mascots, okay. So if I would have reacted. See, when you react, you don't think.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  If I would have reacted, I would have taken that boy, I would have dragged him to the corner, I would have told him, "How dare you talk to me like that?" Because my mother went to the gas chamber. But I did go to God and I asked, "What do I do?" And God told me, "Find the bigot in you." And I said, "That's impossible." I came to America penniless. I went to the bathroom. One of them said, "Call her." I joined the NASCP. I marched with Martin Luther King. And God said, "Find the bigot in you."

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And I created the atmosphere that I do today to people that they can feel any feelings without the fear of being judged. And I said, "Tell me more." He never knew who I was. You never knew a thing about my history. But you see, I did the mommy thing, but I'm pretty old-fashioned, that a mom cannot make a boy into a man. It takes a man. So I referred him to a man with gray hair, someone who's been around. And so that's my experience

• 43:15Speaker 01

  with the white supremacy boy. And this is unfortunately, that happened January 9th in America. January 6th. 6th, I'm sorry. And when I saw someone wearing a shirt, 6 million was not enough. How did you feel? How do you think I felt after Nazi Germany and communist Russia? That history has a tendency to repeat itself.

• 43:48Ryan Holiday?

  Does it concern you? You know, there's that expression, "When the wolves of hate are loose, no one is safe." Does it concern you that that kind of rhetoric and violence and distrust and misinformation and dehumanization, does it concern you that that is spreading again? I mean, in America of all places?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Do you have the book by Adorno, "The Authoritarian Personality"?

• 44:16Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  And he created the California F scale. F stands for fascist. And he tells you that small town USA is ready for fascism. It comes from Harvard.

• 44:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  That people don't question authority. And that's the worst thing you can have is ignorance. And then you blindly adhere to authority. You have to question authority and assign the shame and guilt to the perpetrator. And that's what I did when I went back to Auschwitz.

• 44:56Ryan Holiday?

  And you also have to understand that we are all here in this together, that we're all human beings. The Stoics talk about this idea of "sympathia," that we're all part of this large, you know, sort of cosmic whole. They say, "What's bad for the bee or what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee." And I think we're losing our sense of collective humanity. And that's what puts us in danger of committing in terrible injustices against other human beings.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's wonderful what you're saying, to be for something rather than against. And I think that is so important, because we've never been as divided as we are now. And I know that you are the ambassador. I'm gonna call you the ambassador. Look at all the books behind you. And you're letting people know that the Nazis burned the books.

• 46:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 46:03Ryan Holiday?

  And what's that quote, "Where they burn books, eventually they will burn people"?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  The people were objects.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  You see, killing the Jews was the goal. And have a world without the Jews. But that little Jew, that little Jew, Albert Einstein, came to America and changed the history of World War II.

• 46:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, the irony of the defeat of the Nazi war machine and the Japanese war machine is that it was driven in many ways by the talents and brilliance of the people that they exiled, primarily to England and America. And I think we are in danger of losing sight of that today with our fear and rejection of immigrants, with our demonization of poor people. This is where ideas come from. This is the lifeblood of America, and it always has been.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  You know, Churchill is my hero. We're gonna fight.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yes, Churchill is my hero. Wonderful, wonderful man. When I was in London, thank God, I was interviewed by the CBS and many people. It was so wonderful for me to say that. I loved Churchill and I loved Eisenhower. And I was in Auschwitz when they planned the Normandy invasion. Without the Normandy invasion, I wouldn't be here with you. A mother of three, a grandmother of five, and seven great-grandsons.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And one of them, just one-year-old twin.

• 48:10Ryan Holiday?

  Wow. That's beautiful.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Isn't it?

• 48:15Ryan Holiday?

  It is.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Así que es por eso que nunca voy a retirarme y voy a hacer todo lo que pueda para que usted sepa que eres

• 48:30Speaker 01

  el embajador y continúe leyendo los libros y vendiendo los libros y tener gente como yo una vez por semana o una vez a la semana, donde sea que pueda para que la gente pueda realmente intercambiar filosofías.

• 48:49Ryan Holiday?

  Bueno, estoy verdaderamente honrado y esto es una rareza para mí. Creo que algo que he estado pensando, usted sabe, la gente es tan ambiciosa, ¿verdad? Quieren ser famosos, quieren ser ricos, quieren ser poderosos. Pero realmente, tan exitosos como son sus libros, nada coincidirá con el impacto multi代代际 que usted acaba de hablar de. Que tuvieron hijos que tenían nietos y grandes nietos. Ese es el impacto que tenemos. Ese es el mensaje que dejamos para el futuro, es los hijos que tenemos y cómo raised esos hijos y qué valores les damos.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Y usted sabe qué, mis libros están en la mesa de la habitación de mis grandes nietos.

• 49:35Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Entonces, por favor, continúe vendiendo los libros y déjense que la gente sepa que los libros fueron, desafortunadamente, eliminados durante los nazis y usted está aquí para que ellos sepan qué pasa cuando las buenas personas hacen cosas muy, muy malas. Y eso fue algo que no es comparable a nada porque nunca en la historia de la humanidad tan científico y sistematico.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Inhalation of people existed. I watched the other day the Nuremberg Trial. Oh, it was so brilliantly done.

• 50:25Ryan Holiday?

  It's incredible to think how little these things can start, right? And I think that that is the other message from the Second World War, that this horrible tragedy, although it has sort of systemic, you know, roots, that it's really springs from the almost the single-handed hatred and insanity of a single individual, that one person can put all of those events in motion. And I heard a I heard a great quip at the beginning of the pandemic before we were, you know, before we were quite sure of the the origins. They said, if you don't believe an individual can change the world, talk to the person who ate a bat, right?

• 51:07Ryan Holiday?

  When we thought that a bat had spread coronavirus to to all these people. You know, Hitler is is proof that a horrible individual can change humanity for the worse. But Churchill and de Gaulle are proof that an individual can can redeem history, can can can change history for the better. And I think that's that's the choice, right? Are you going to be a hero or a villain? And that's the one thing that we decide. No one, no one gets to choose that for us. We decide.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  I I was told that there was a Jewish guy in Czechoslovakia, and he didn't have any money to go to Vienna to take a test, to become an artist and go to school. So he walked to Vienna and he begged them to take the test. And they allowed him. And next to him was Hitler. He had a different name. And Hitler flunked, and he made it. And he had tremendous guilt that if he would have flunked,

• 52:21Speaker 01

  then we wouldn't have the Hitler who became a Hitler. And he had tremendous guilt, survivor's guilt, that Hitler really wanted to be an artist. He was a beaten child. And if you want to read any books, you read Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller. And she is amazing. And the book, especially for your own good,

• 53:02Speaker 01

  has to do with Hitler having a terrible childhood, beaten by his father, and that had a great deal to do, that he was never a loved child. And, you know, there is a difference between what I believe, but there is a difference of what kind of life you lead. See, I am very interested in having faith, which is very different from believe. I don't care what you believe. I want to know what kind of life you lead. Because words can be very cheap commodities.

• 53:46Ryan Holiday?

  My friend Stephen Pressfield, he's a great writer. And he jokes that it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than to pursue his dreams as an artist. And I think that that's true. You know, we can be so afraid of what our calling is. We can be afraid to be vulnerable and real. And Hitler chose hatred and destruction and pain and nihilism.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Blame, blame.

• 54:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and blame.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Why do you blame? You're still a child.

• 54:21Ryan Holiday?

  And he was an infant. I mean, when you, when you watch some of his tantrums, or you see some of the things that, that he would say to his... Yes, right. He's a small child who's in charge of an enormous army. And we see how destructive that turned out to be.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  That's what happened when a country suffers economically.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  That's what happened with the Ayatollah. "Let's go kill Carter," and so on. I think it's very, very important that you are an ambassador.

• 54:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, thank you. This is, this is a complete honor and a treat. And I'm, I am glad that you are here to still talk to us. This is, uh, this is an incredible journey that you've been on. And I, I respect all your contributions and your message. It made a huge difference in my life. And I know it's made a huge difference in the lives of so many people. So it must have been a very dark time there in Auschwitz.

• 55:23Ryan Holiday?

  But, but the light for all of us is that you, you persevered because now we get to bask in that light.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  So don't call me shrink, call me stretch. And today I help people to stretch your comfort zone.

• 55:42Ryan Holiday?

  And your heart, make your heart bigger.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:46Ryan Holiday?

  You help people stretch to make their hearts bigger.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  That's it. And I have my cherished wound, and you have your cherished wound. And don't try to run from the past. Face it, recognizing that life is difficult. Life is not easy. You can make it easier.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  But it's not easy. So if you don't change, you don't grow. There is a Latin saying, I studied Latin. "Tempora mutantur." "Times are changing." "Ethnos mutamurinis." "Times are changing and we are changing with the times." Don't go back. Use this time out to regroup, to re-decide. That there is no going back. There is a new beginning. When people ask me, "Did you love your husband?" And I told them, "I was very, very lonely. I was very skinny.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  And most of all, I was very hungry. And someone gave me Hungarian salami. And that's how I got married." But then they say, "But you went back to him." I said, "No." When I went again, I was a woman to a parent. And then we got married and we flip-flopped. I was a parent, I was a child. And what my husband had nothing to do with the divorce. It was me. Hungry, wanting to have more dates. Because I never had a date in my life. He had nothing to do with it.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  So I think, I hope today is people's time out to really take inventory. Because many times, people in midlife say, "I have a midlife crisis." No, you don't. There is no crisis. There is a transition.

• 57:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's a new beginning, it's a fresh start.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  It's a fresh start. And there is no problem. There is a challenge. So you have a challenge and a transition. Not a crisis.

• 58:10Ryan Holiday?

  I have tattooed on my arm, "The obstacle is the way."

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Show me again.

• 58:17Ryan Holiday?

  The obstacle is the way.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Is the way, and it's gonna be your way. You're unique, you're one of a kind, Diamond.

• 58:27Ryan Holiday?

  This was my first book about philosophy, The Obstacle is the Way.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Thank you. How many books did you read? Right, right.

• 58:36Ryan Holiday?

  I've written 11 books.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Oh my God. So you're gonna have a dozen books.

• 58:43Ryan Holiday?

  I'm trying to get to a dozen, yes. My next book is about courage. I'm doing a book, a series of books on the cardinal virtues, courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you. I hope I'll be alive to read it. And I couldn't be more, more satisfied today that I met someone who is, who is doing everything in his power to see to it that that Holocaust will never, ever happen again. And I want to thank you for your commitment and remembering, I picture to us that it's not what happens, it's what we do with it.

• 59:28Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say, thank you.