Love is a choice

Holocaust survivor, Dr. Edith Eva Eger, was a young teenager when she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. On the day of her arrival, her parents were ushered to the gas chamber by a guard who, later that same day, made her dance for him for his entertainment. In her incredible book The Choice, Dr. Eger—now a world-renowned psychologist—recounts how she was tested by a patient—a fourteen-year-old boy, sent to her by a judge, for car theft. The boy leaned on her desk and said, “I’m going to kill all the Jews.” He said he would also kill anyone who wasn’t white. He went on ranting about the blights to America’s purity.

“I thought I would be sick,” Dr. Eger says. “I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. … My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.”

She prayed for the ability to meet him with love—the accepting and unconditional love she gave to all her patients. “I summoned every image I had of unconditional love.” She called to mind a story of one of the Righteous Gentiles, Corrie ten Boom, who was sent with her family to a concentration camp. Corrie’s sister died there, in her arms. Eventually, she was released (due to a clerical error) and a few years later, met with one of the vilest guards at her camp—one of the guards who was responsible for her sister’s death. She could have lashed out at him, spit at him, wished him the worst. Instead, “she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love.”

“I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love,” Dr. Eger remembers thinking. “What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?”

She decided to let the boy talk. She listened. She realized they had a lot in common. She had lost her parents, and so had he. “We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something [he] couldn’t [give himself]—an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, You are too much for me. … We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.”