Edith Eva Eger, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author whose traumatic experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps — including being forced to dance for Josef Mengele, the notorious physician known as the “Angel of Death” — enabled her to identify with and treat emotionally troubled patients, died on April 27 at her home in San Diego. She was 98.

Her emotional recovery took time: For two decades after the war, she did not discuss the privations she had endured or the atrocities she had witnessed. She learned that she had to forgive herself for surviving, which she barely had. When American soldiers liberated Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945, she lay nearly motionless in a heap of corpses, weighing barely 70 pounds and suffering from pneumonia, typhoid fever, and pleurisy.

“I release them,” she told the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, referring to her Nazi captors, adding: “It’s not me forgiving them for what they did to me. I think it’s mostly liberating myself, to invest my energy in the future.”