This is the best book I’ve ever read by a holocaust survivor. She is still alive, and wrote this in 2018. The lessons she learned were clearly explained and profoundly applicable to today, not only for those that have been through trauma, but for all of us.

She writes well and had many pithy phrases that I thought I’d capture here for you:

• “When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them.”
• “Suffering is universal, but victimhood is optional.”
• “There is no hierarchy of suffering. There is nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.”
• “Survivors don’t have time to ask,’Why me.’ For survivors, the only relevant question is, ‘what now?'”
• “I would love to help you escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be.”
• “The question is not, Why did I live? but, What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?”
• “All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.”
• “Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
• “We have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or pay attention to what we still have.”
• “Survival is a matter of interdependence. Survival isn’t possible alone.”
• “To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself.”
• “Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes pain worse.”
• “Fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. Habits of placating and pretending only make us worse.”
• “There are two worlds. The one I choose and the one I deny.”
• “What are we consciously teaching our children about safety, values, love?”
• “What if silence and denial aren’t the only choices to make in the wake of a catastrophic loss?”
• “We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.”
• “No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. This realization will change my life.”
• “How could I help people transcend self-limiting beliefs, to become who they were meant to be in the world?”
• “To change our behavior, we must change our feeling, and to change our feelings, we must change our thoughts.”
• “The foundation of our persistent suffering is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth.”
• “Two of my most important phrases in any therapeutic encounter are: ‘I hear you say’ and ‘Tell me more…'”
• “Freedom is about CHOICE: about choosing Compassion, Humor, Optimism, Intuition, Curiosity, and self-Expression.”
• “To be free is to live in the present.”
• “You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.”
• “We can choose to be our own jailers, or we can choose to be free.”
• “Feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal.”
• “When you have something to prove, you aren’t free.”
• “You can’t heal what you can’t feel.”
• “Anger, no matter how consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel fear and love at the same time.”
• “A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.”
• “I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”
• “To forgive is to grieve– for what happened, for what didn’t happen–and give up the need for a different past. To accept life for what it was and as it is.”
• “Stress is the body’s response to any demand for change.”
• “As she practices loving all parts of herself, she discovered more joy in her life, more ease. Release begins with acceptance.”
• “Most members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old. These lost children are looking for identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.”
• “There is one life I can save: It is mine. The one I’m living right now, this precious moment.”
• “My Jungian therapist taught me that although it feels like the palette of human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared. I found it less overwhelming to learn to identify only four feelings.”
• Questions to ask to liberate you from your victimhood: What do you want? Is it our authentic selves that want it or a need to please others or get their approval? What are you going to do about it? When?
• “The biggest prison is your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgement and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are– human, imperfect, and whole.”
• “You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.”

This was an amazing book. I’ll be hard pressed to read a better one this year. While her experience was horrible, her overcoming is uplifting and inspiring. I give this five stars and heartily recommend it.