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For award-winning director and producer John Coles, making a documentary about Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger has been a journey that started in one place, and ended — thanks to unforeseen events — in an entirely different and unexpected destination.
Originally his goal was to make a film about Eger’s unusual life – explored in her 2018 autobiography, The Choice: Embrace the Possible – about how she survived the terrors of the Holocaust and became a psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
But first there was an actors’ and writers’ strike, then the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, which left over 1,200 people dead, 5,400 injured, and 251 kidnapped, and finally an unexpected revelation from Iris Haim, the mother of an Israeli hostage killed accidentally by the Israel Defense Forces.
Everything changed.
Eger, who is now 97, is one of life’s true survivors. As a 16-year-old girl, she was sent to the death camp Auschwitz, and hours after her mother was killed in the gas chambers, Nazi physician Josef Mengele forced her to dance for his amusement.
When American troops liberated the camp in 1945, she was discovered barely alive in a pile of corpses. She weighed just 32 kilograms (70.5 pounds), had a broken back, typhoid, pneumonia and pleurisy.
In 1949, Eger moved with her husband and daughter to the United States and became a psychologist.
After decades of suffering, where she hid her terrible past, she visited Auschwitz and began a remarkable process of healing, which culminated in two books, The Choice and The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save your Life, which shows how to find freedom in even the worst circumstances.
Moving forward after adversity
Coles, 66, who produced and directed a string of widely acclaimed series including “Homeland,” “The West Wing” and “House of Cards,” and who has his own production company, Talking Wall Pictures, came across Eger four years ago through her book, and through friendship with her daughter, and decided to develop her story into a movie.
“I am fascinated by the idea of how people who are put in these incredibly difficult adversarial situations manage to move forward,” he says. “And I thought that was something important to try to share with the world.”
Development ground to a halt during the Hollywood strike, and when Hamas attacked Israel, Coles – who has a strong personal connection to Israel, not only through his father, a doctor, who had volunteered there during the 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war, but also through his own visits to the country — understood that he had to think anew.
“I was horrified and aghast at what happened that day, though I was aware that opinions were divided, even before Israel began its military response,” he says. “I really wanted to see what I could do to connect with this event in a more personal and tangible way.
“It occurred to me that it would be interesting to look at some of the stories of that through the prism and frame of the ideas that are central to Edie’s book, and her ideas to do with healing and facing demons.”
A letter of forgiveness
The question of how to do that was answered in December 2023, when Haim, whose 28-year-old son, Yotam, had been kidnapped on October 7, and held hostage for two months, was shot and killed accidentally by Israeli soldiers as he tried to escape Hamas.
Instead of blaming the soldiers, Haim sent them a message forgiving them and said she blamed only Hamas.
“I love you very much and hug you from afar,” she wrote. “I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas. Don’t think that you killed a hostage deliberately. You have to look after yourselves because that’s the only way you can look after us.”
It was an act of such astounding compassion and magnanimity that it moved the world.
When asked what motivated her, and the touchstones that gave her strength, she immediately pulled out a copy of Eger’s book, The Choice.
A meeting was arranged between Eger and Haim in the US. Coles and his team came to film, along with photographer and artist Kim Lieberman.
He found his focus
As Coles worked with the footage, he realized that these two women, though generations apart, had dealt with extraordinary traumas and yet managed to make their choices positive and to find a way forward.
“They resonated with one another in a very powerful way. And I thought, well here’s our focus,” he says.
Coles and his film crew arrived in Israel in October. They met with Haim and her family and visited Kfar Aza, the kibbutz where Yotam was kidnapped.
“We spent a day with Iris talking about Yotam, the struggles he went through, and what happened. It’s a very powerful and extraordinary story, but a heartbreaking and difficult one as well.”
They also interviewed Israeli journalists, psychologists, former hostages including Sapir Cohen, 29, who was released in November 2023, and hostage family members still fighting to get their loved ones out of Gaza.
“It was an extraordinary trip,” says Coles. “Edie has been processing her experiences for 70 to 80 years, whereas these people now dealing with it are in a very much more raw time.”
Israeli resilience in tough times
Being in Israel in the middle of this war, and one of the most difficult and tumultuous periods of its history, was also an experience for Coles.
In Tel Aviv, he found a sense of normalcy, that life goes on. But in the south, just a few kilometers from the Gaza border, where he also visited the site of the Supernova music festival massacre, things were very different.
“The vestiges of what happened on October 7th are very manifest and it’s deeply disturbing and moving,” he tells ISRAEL21c.
“It was almost like there were two Israels that I was seeing, one that’s at war and that is struggling to defend itself against these forces, and the other, this wonderful flowering of the desert, and this vitality.”
He was also surprised to discover that some of his crew members had just been released from reserve duty and had been in combat over the last few weeks.
“It was something I had never imagined. I talked to a crew member who said that at some points he didn’t think he was going to return alive from Gaza,” says Coles. “To be faced with that kind of situation and to have that kind of courage and then to come back and to be working on lighting an interview — that was something that I thought was extraordinary. It taught me a lot about the Israeli character and resilience.”
Another thing he found striking was the cultural and political divide now fragmenting Israel. Coming just a short time before the US election, he understood that the same divisions occurring in the US were occurring in Israel as well.
“As Americans we have a certain chauvinism and think we are at the center of the universe, but that’s not true at all. The fact is a lot of what we’re experiencing in the US is being echoed in places around the world, and certainly in Israel, as we try to navigate a divided and fractured culture.”
An acclaimed career
Through his career, Coles has worked on many widely acclaimed dramas including “The Right Stuff,” “Bates Hotel,” “Homeland,” “Sex and the City,” “New Amsterdam,” “Elementary,” “The Sinner,” “Law and Order” and “Criminal Intent.”
He has also directed movies with stars such as Matt Damon, Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges, and even directed off-Broadway plays.
He feels, however, that the work he did on the political shows “The West Wing” and the Netflix phenomenon, “House of Cards,” for which he was nominated for an Emmy and a PGA award, have had the most impact on this new documentary.
“‘The West Wing’ was set during the end of the Clinton and start of the Bush era, and it was a show that presented a kind of romanticized vision of what the American government could be. It was a sort of wish fulfillment show, a show of what we all aspire to for the political process.
“Ten years later I was pulled into ‘House of Cards,’ which was exploring the much darker side of ambition and power, and how those things play out. It peeled back illusions and looked at what was really going on.”
He believes these shows relate to what Eger tries to do in her life and through her work.
“When you talk about the Holocaust or October 7th, the possibility of hopefulness comes out of that, as well as the possibility of despair. It’s how we take those events and find a way to be hopeful as opposed to letting them lead us into a land of despair that we can never recover from,” he says.
The years since these shows were aired have obviously seen a great deal of change in the White House. What kind of show might reflect the Trump government?
“It’s hard to imagine at this point,” admits Coles. “A black comedy perhaps. It’s very hard to do the kind of straight drama that we did.”
Finding the right balance
This will be Coles’ second documentary. His first, aired on PBS, he shot while at Amherst College and was about the challenges the school faced as it became coeducational.
Is it hard to go from fictional series to documentaries?
“It’s difficult in these situations [October 7] to ascertain what the boundaries are. What it’s okay to talk about, and at what point you go into territory that’s really personal and difficult, and not fully digested. Finding the balance was always on my mind.
“I appreciated the fact that people were willing to share, but I didn’t want to exploit that in any way,” he says.
For Coles, making this film has also been a journey of his own, finding a way to navigate personal tragedies, by seeing how others have dealt with extreme challenges.
When we spoke, Coles was just 10 days into editing the film, which has the working title “The Choice,” with an Israeli editor in New York. It is still unsure when the film might be finished.
“We are trying to ask key questions, and let viewers find their own answers. The beauty of doing this as a documentary is to let people speak their truths and then we put them together rather than my coming in with a larger truth that I want to hammer forward,” he says.
He hopes that this will be a documentary of ideas and emotions. “It’s not a narrative, nor is it programmatic in any way.”
Will there be more documentaries in the years to come?
“It’s sort of like asking someone in the middle of a marathon if they will do another one,” he laughs. “But it has certainly been a fascinating journey.”
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