FREE

 

I finished a great book last week, The Gift by Edith Enger. She is a 94-year-old renowned psychologist and also a Holocaust survivor. She arrived at Auschwitz at age 16. Her parents were executed the day they arrived at Auschwitz, and that first night, Edith, a young ballerina, was made to perform for Josef Mengele, a nazi known as the Angel of Death. Her life was spared and she spent months in Auschwitz before going on to the so-called Death March. She was rescued by a black American soldier in Gunskirchen, who saw her hand move in a pile of dead bodies. She weighed 70 pounds.  If you have not read her story, please go check it out! 

The book was a collection of her clients' stories from years of her practice, interwoven with pieces of her own story. She shares the 12 most common imprisoning thoughts/behaviors she has encountered over the years and her tools for overcoming them.  

My favorite story from the book was near the end.  Several years ago Edith was invited to attend a ballet portraying her own story, a retelling of the night she had to perform for Mengele.  She says “In that theater with my daughter, watching moments of my past being brought to life on the stage, I knew again what I realized that night in the barracks- that while Mengele had all the power, while day after day he chose with his grotesquely wagging finger who would live and who would die, he was more a prisoner than I was.

I was innocent. 

And free.”

Something in these lines unlocked a deep truth that was transformative for me in my own story of victimization.  When justice does not come for the oppressors, I was reminded that they are already imprisoned. They are imprisoned by their power, their shame, and their endless hungering. They are imprisoned to the self. As they perpetuate more suffering and selfishness these bars grow tighter and their chains weigh them down. They will never find wholeness or freedom in the pursuit of their own glory. They are starving. 

Mengele never was brought to justice by human standards. He fled to Argentina and changed his name.  He drowned while swimming in 1979 after suffering a stroke in the water. Helpless, powerless, sinking from the weight of his own body. He was identified posthumously via forensic evidence.

Was he ever free? 

What prisons, Oh God, would you have me unlock within myself? What chains? 

Thank you for showing me that you have designed us all to be free when we walk in your Spirit of love, and also to be prisoners when we walk in the Spirit of selfishness, anger, wrath, greed, vengeance, and pride.  

Help me be a woman who stands in Your love and freedom even as I advocate for love and freedom, even as I honor my personal story and the experiences of others, that true Justice belongs to You, and Your design is perfect.