Lessons from my father: Three strategies for resilience and survival

Dr. Jill Gabrielle Klein is author of “We Got the Water: Tracing My Family’s Path through Auschwitz”

My father had to cope with an unfathomable situation: at the young age of 16, he was a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was deported from Hungary in the spring of 1944, was separated from his family and friends, and spent a year in Nazi concentration camps.

Today he is 85. In the decades since the war ended he has enjoyed life to its fullest, having decided the day he was liberated that he would not give any more of himself to his captors by continuing to suffer. My father speaks at schools, churches,...