The ballerina of Auschwitz
Obituary | The ballerina of Auschwitz
Edith Eger danced for Josef Mengele
The “Ballerina of Auschwitz” died on April 27th, aged 98
“Dance!” That was what he said to her on her first night in the camp. Edith Eger could dance, of course: she had been learning ballet since she was five years old. In her leotard and tights, she had practised her stretches. Down she would go: spine straight, tummy taut, breathe in, breathe out…She knew how to use her breath to control her body. She knew an entire routine to “The Blue Danube”. She thought she was imagining it when she heard that being played in the camp on her first night. Then he had appeared in her barracks. “Little dancer,” he said. “Dance for me.” That was what he would call her: “My little dancer.” They would call him the “Angel of Death”.
Later, after she moved to America, she didn’t want to call that place anything at all. She didn’t want anyone’s pity. She just wanted to be a Yankee doodle American. Besides, she didn’t even know how to pronounce that word in English: “Auschwitz”. How do you say that without an accent? So she never said it. Though later, when other people found out about her past, they would use its name to her. It’s pretty bad, they’d say of some problem or other, but “it’s not Auschwitz”. She felt that was wrong: there was no hierarchy of suffering. She didn’t want people to see her suffering and think theirs was less significant. She wanted them to look at her and think: if she can do it, so can I!
She started to speak out. First, in therapy herself, then as she trained to become a psychologist, then finally as a bestselling author. Always, her message was the same: you cannot change or forget the past but you can choose how you respond to it. You can be depressed or you can be happy. That choice at least is yours. Though she, at first, had had no choice. In her new life as a wife and mother in Baltimore she could not control how she reacted to things. She felt anxious when she heard a siren. She felt dizzy when she heard heavy footsteps. When a bus driver shouted at her she huddled on the floor of the bus, crying and shaking. It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t Auschwitz. And it was always Auschwitz.
What do you do with your past? She was only 17 when the war ended but she already had so much past; she had already seen so much. Like that boy in the camp. He had been tied to a tree then SS soldiers had shot at him. They shot his foot, his arm, his hands, an ear. A little boy, used as target practice. Then there was the girl who tried to escape. The soldiers had shot her then hung her body in the middle of the camp as an example. And there was the pregnant woman: when she went into labour, the SS tied her legs together. She had never seen agony like hers.
She would remember good things, too, like her home in what was then Hungary. It had been full of music: one sister was a violinist, another a pianist—and she was the dancer, then a gymnast. At 16 she was suddenly chosen for the Olympic training team. Then, equally suddenly, she was kicked off it because of her “background”. Her “background” had become her foreground: she now wore a yellow star. Then, one night, soldiers came and took her family away. Yet the music continued: as they walked into Auschwitz beneath the “Arbeit macht frei” sign, the camp orchestra started up. Her father turned to her, delighted. “You see,” he said. “It can’t be a terrible place.” She would never see him again.
Memory was what mattered. That was one of the last things her mother said to her. As the train drew closer to Auschwitz she had turned to Edith. All that they had had been taken but, she said, “no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.” When they got off the trucks, they took her mother, too. A gap-toothed soldier was sorting women into two queues, asking each: are you sick? His voice was almost kind. The ill, the old—and her mother—he sent to the left. She tried to follow but he held her shoulder. “She’s just going to take a shower.” Later, she asked another prisoner where her mother was. The prisoner nodded at a smoking chimney. “Your mother is burning in there. You better start talking about her in the past tense.”
The gap-toothed man came back that night. She learned that he was Josef Mengele, the camp doctor; the “Angel of Death”. She learned he liked to walk through each evening, looking for inmates to entertain him. He was a refined killer and a lover of the arts. There was a camp orchestra: prisoners were played in to jaunty marches; beaten to Viennese waltzes. Mengele stopped at her barracks. He wanted a dancer and she found herself being pushed forward. The camp orchestra struck up “The Blue Danube”. “Dance!” he said, but she could not move. Then, she remembered her mother’s words. Her body was trapped but her mind was her own. So she freed herself with it. She imagined that she was not dancing in Auschwitz for her mother’s killer but on stage in the Budapest opera house. She danced for love. She danced for life.
Though when the war ended and the death march began she nearly died. The Germans made them march for days, until she was so hungry that she ate grass, so weak that she could not stand. She lay on a pile of corpses. She heard someone shout “The Americans have arrived!” but could not move. She weighed about 30kg. A hand—she would learn that it belonged to an American GI—was held out to her; in his palm were red, green and yellow beads. “Food,” he said. She would learn that these were called M&M’s.
Later she would learn other things, too. She would learn that of the more than 15,000 deportees of her hometown, 70 survived. She would learn that what made her fall to the floor shaking was called “post-traumatic stress disorder”—though she didn’t like that word “disorder”. Her reactions were not disordered, but natural. And she would learn how to pronounce that word: “Auschwitz”—though she would, to the end of her days, say it with an accent. But that no longer mattered. You cannot, she had learnt, change your past. But you can choose how you feel about it. You can choose happiness. You can choose to love. You can choose to dance. ■
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