Chanukah Day #5: Dancing Before Dr. Mengele

Edith Eiger was a young Jewish girl born in Hungary, training as a serious student of the ballet, hoping one day to join the Olympics. But at the age of 16, her world crumbled, she and her family and the entire Jewish community were stuffed into cattle cars on route to the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp. Just a little while before they arrived at Auschwitz, her mother turned to her and said, "Edith, I don't know where we are heading. I don't know what will be, but I want you to remember this. Nobody can take away from you, what you put into your mind". We were on our way to Auschwitz and my mom held me, and this is what she said. She said, 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. A few moments later, the doors of the cattle cars opened. They were sent out to the platform of Auschwitz. Her mother was sent immediately to the gas chambers. Edith was sent to one of the barracks. That night Josef Mengele, the famous doctor of Auschwitz, the angel of death arrived at her barrack. Mengele loved music and cherished dance and he heard that there was a great Hungarian Jewish dancer in Auschwitz. He summoned Edith and he asked her to dance before him, knowing that her mother was exterminated that day, she was stripped from everything. The last thing she wanted to do was dance, but then she remembered the life changing wisdom that her mother told her right before they arrived at that hell. Remember, they can take away everything from you, but nobody can take away that, which you put into your own mind. And she says, in my imagination, I was in the Budapest opera house, listening to strains of Tchaikovsky and dancing away. Mengele was quite impressed. And when she finished, he threw a loaf of bread at her. A loaf of bread in Auschwitz was worth more than $10 million, but she did not consume it alone. She distributed it to the other girls who shared with her, the planks of wood called a bed. At the end of the war, she joined the death march for Mauthausen with 2000 Jewish skeletons. Only 100 survived. She weighed 70 pounds. Her back was broken. She was starving. She was a skeleton. She couldn't walk, but it was those four girls who received from her that priceless gift of bread who carried her and saved her life. Today, she lives in California. She's 94 years old and she still practices as a therapist. She published her first best-selling book at the age of 91 called the choice. She writes, "I teach all of my patients, in the morning, you can look in the mirror and say, it's going to be another creepy day. Or you can say, I'm going to honor myself, treasure myself, cherish myself, and I can make a difference today because pain is universal. Victimhood is optional. And to find that perhaps, the biggest concentration camp is right in your own mind, and the key is in your pocket. Each day, I must wake up in the morning and ask myself, who am I? Jewish answer is the one presented by the life of Edith Eiger. I am a menorah. I am a source of light. Ner Hashem nishams adam. Proverbs says the soul of a human being is a divine flame. I am the light of divinity in the world. I am an ambassador of love, light, hope, healing and redemption.