Edith Eger
(USC shoah foundation, Zikaron BaSalon)
Edith Eger was born in 1927 in Kosice, (then Czechoslovakia, later Hungary, now Slovakia) to Hungarian Jewish parents. She had two sisters.
In 1938, the first anti-jewish laws were passed in Hungary, which also took effect in Kosice as the region had been re-annexed to Hungary in late 1938.
After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Edith and her family were forced into a local ghetto and six weeks later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Edith and her sister Magda were then transferred to several concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Gunskirchen, from which they were liberated by the U.S. Army. After the war, Edith moved to Czechoslovakia and got married.
In 1949, she and her husband emigrated to the U.S., where she became a world-famous psychologist and author. She has three children, five grandchildren, and multiple great-grandchildren.
Thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation who are the caretakers of a treasure of 52,000 testimonies of survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust, their stories can reach millions of classrooms and museums around the world to ensure that the voices of survivors will be heard, understood, discussed, and perpetuated for generations.