“Auschwitz was my greatest classroom.”
–Dr. Edith Eva Eger
Auschwitz is wordless. It is a word that words fail. We diminish its grotesque enormity by placing it alongside language that seems quotidian and banal. Torture. Hatred. Murder. Nothing can do it justice. And yet, Dr. Edith Eger calls Auschwitz her “greatest classroom.” Elsewhere, she has described her time in Auschwitz as her “cherished wound.”
Dr. Eger is a psychologist and best-selling author in San Diego. When she was sixteen, she and her family were shipped in a cattle car from their home in Hungary to the death camp in Auschwitz, where her parents were killed by the Nazis. Eger survived only because an American soldier happened to notice a hand moving in a pile of dead bodies and quickly summoned medical help.
I trust no one reads Dr. Eger’s remarks as an endorsement of the Holocaust, and anyone who does is being morally obtuse. Instead, she is saying something beautiful and profound. It is not simply the familiar idea that steel is hardened by fire, though that is certainly true. A person can emerge stronger from trials, and the only way to learn resilience is to fail. This is the Hero’s Journey, which is a timeless staple of popular culture and the plot of every Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings movie: everyman embarks on a great quest and endures a terrible ordeal in order to save mankind, and from which he (it’s almost always a he) comes back changed in ways that mark him as different and better than before.
But I do not think Dr. Eger is repackaging her experience in Auschwitz as a set piece in this shopworn philosophy. I think she is saying that steel needs the fire to achieve its greatest potential. The steel that passes through fire and does not break emerges as the best that steel can be. It achieves what the ancient Greeks called its arete, which is often translated as virtue or excellence, but really means the fulfillment of all that a person or thing can ideally be, in every respect. Steel achieves its arete only if it passes through fire.
Dr. Eger is making the extraordinary claim that a person cannot achieve their fullest potential as a human being—they cannot truly know wisdom or humility; virtue or grace; strength or resilience—without having first endured horrific trials. These trials are a gift because they present the opportunity for the fulfillment of one’s potential.
I do not know whether Dr. Eger is right. As a matter of sociology or psychology, as opposed to myth or popular culture, I do not know whether our fulfillment depends on great suffering. But I am fully prepared to accept that those who endure great suffering and who turn it to their advantage—who use it as their “greatest classroom”—will become extraordinary human beings. This builds on what I was trying to convey in my last essay, where I recounted the provocative line I have so often heard from friends imprisoned for decades: “Prison saved my life.” Tens of thousands of people have turned the misery and wretchedness of a high-security prison into a classroom and arrived at a place much closer to the arete of humanity.
I hasten to add two important qualifiers that hardly need to be said, but that some people need to hear. First, no prison in the United States is remotely like a Nazi death camp. As long as we use words to convey truth, the space between the two cannot be bridged. But for nearly everyone, a high-security prison is a place of great suffering, and those who can use the suffering as a classroom in the human condition come closer to what we imagine as the ideal citizen than those who have never endured such trials. And second, to recognize this reality is no more an endorsement of prison than Dr. Eger’s teachings are an endorsement of Auschwitz. Suffering may be a gift, as Dr. Eger supposes, but that does not mean we need to lock people up to bestow the gift upon them.
I have been struggling to communicate these ideas for years but recognize that I still have a long way to go before they are sensible. For one thing, even if pain carries within it the potential to create something exceptional, that doesn’t give anyone the moral right to inflict it on another. You cannot make another person miserable on the pretense that you are helping them become fulfilled human beings. Similarly, suffering is hardly an unalloyed good. Prison, for instance, destroys a great many people. They do not emerge stronger. Sometimes, they do not emerge at all, and for every person who says they were saved by prison, scores would likely say it crushed them. Many might truthfully say both.
And some trials are simply beyond human endurance. Over the years, I have defended countless people who suffered the most horrific, revolting traumas, usually at the hands of those who claimed to love them. They survived, but emerged broken in ways that no medicine could heal and suffering a pain that no treatment could relieve. They could no more turn their experience into something beautiful than they could transform lead into gold. No one should romanticize suffering, and the idea of misery as a classroom has to be qualified. We do not achieve the arete of humanity simply by being mistreated.
The way through this puzzle is to recognize that it is not suffering alone that fulfills us, but also the response to it, and in particular the people who surround you as you contend with the grief and misery you have endured. There is a great deal of scholarship that suggests this, at least indirectly. Researchers have long wondered why some children are more resilient than others. Why do some children thrive in the face of great adversity while others flounder? And as children pass into adulthood, how, if at all, do they overcome the adversities they endured when they were young? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is that it’s complicated, but that no one overcomes great adversity by themselves.
For children, the most important determinant is probably a secure, stable home with one or more loving parents, but even when that is absent, children can develop resilience if they receive love and support from others. Likewise, adults can move beyond the traumas of early life with the help of nurturing relationships formed later in life. There is no single path to resilience, but no one seems to walk it alone.
You can see that this research is not exactly Dr. Eger’s point. She is not making a point about resilience; she argues that great adversity is a wound to be “cherished,” and that we cannot become fully human without it. But the resilience research suggests it is not the wound alone that allows us to achieve this fulfillment; it is also the nurturance and support we receive after it. In short, it is the combination of great suffering and unconditional love that allows humans to achieve their arete. Auschwitz cannot be a great classroom for those left to absorb its lessons alone.
At least for some people, I think this is what happens in prison. They have endured a combination of terrible suffering and unconditional love that has allowed them to piece themselves back together and build something extraordinary. Just how that might happen, especially in a place of such unrelenting misery, is for another day.
In the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at jm347@cornell.edu.