The Choice by Edith Eger

It’s 1944 and sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger is sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.

The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.

I will start by saying that Edith Eger is extraordinary, not only in terms of the events she has faced in her life but also the way in which she thinks about them and has learned to come to terms with them.

First, she was highly skilled at ballet and was a member of the Hungarian national gymnastics team. That’s a lifetime’s achievement in itself. She was then rounded up by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and made to do back-breaking labour on a very meagre diet. When she was liberated at the end of the war, she was so weak that she was almost left for dead. She survived and returned to her hometown but Hungary was then taken over by a communist government and she fled with her husband to the USA. There, she trained as a psychologist and learned through her patients ways in which to accept what had happened to her.

How can anybody come to terms with being tortured by the Nazis? How can anybody forgive the people who killed their relatives and friends? Eger’s life is irreparably changed by her experiences but, even after everything she has been through, she knows that the only person who suffers as a result of hate is the person carrying that feeling around with them.

The Choice is one of the most remarkable memoirs I have ever read. Eger is evidence that events such as the Holocaust push the human spirit to its very limits, both in the horrific cruelty dealt out by the Nazis and in the strength, courage and hope the victims were forced to adopt.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.