Edith Eva Eger
She was born on 29 September 1927 to a Hungarian Jewish family in Košice. At just sixteen, she was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered and where she was forced to dance for Mengele. Along with her sister Magda, she survived several camps and a death march. In 1945, American soldiers pulled her from a pile of dead bodies in Mauthausen. For decades after the war, she battled with trauma and guilt. In America, where she and her husband eventually emigrated under dramatic circumstances after the communist coup, she earned her doctorate in clinical psychology, raised three children, and opened her own therapy practice. At the request of the US Army, she began helping soldiers at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. Initially, she was completely unable to talk about her own past. But then she decided to break her silence and, after thirty-five years, returned to Auschwitz. It was only there that she understood that in order to heal, she first had to forgive. Not Hitler or Mengele. But herself.