But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich 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.

realized that day how much my two patients, who appeared so different, had in common—with each other and with all people everywhere. Both women were responding to a situation they couldn’t control in which their expectations had been upended.

Strength isn’t reacting, it’s responding—feeling your feelings, thinking them over, and planning an effective action to bring you closer to your goal.

Trying to be the caretaker who sees to another person’s every need is as problematic as avoiding your responsibility to yourself.

We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we find our freedom to, we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits

This is the way we misinterpret the facts of our lives, the way we assume and don’t check it out, the way we invent a story to tell ourselves, reinforcing the very thing in us we already believe.

If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself. For me, that someone is Magda, that

hair.” It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.