The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eger

This book is a memoir published in 2017 by Dr. Edith Eva Eger in the age of 90, a
psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. After enduring anti-Semitism, cruelty, communism, and
xenophobia, Eger integrates the lessons she learned to show how everyone can choose
freedom and halt cycles of suffering. The memoir incorporates World War II history and
psychological analysis into Eger’s story of survival, recovery, and joy.

Since this is a memoir, the characters did exist in real life. Eddie‘s family played the
biggest part in Edie‘s life – her father Lajos Eléfant, a man with a big smile and a great sense
of humour, was a dressmaker who was very in love with her mother, Ilona. Ilona was a
serious woman, she often prayed to her mother for help. They both died at selection in
Auschwitz. Edie had two other sister‘s – Klara and Magda. Klara was a violinist and was sent
to Budapest to perform, she stayed there in hiding until the end of war. With Magda, Edie
was moved through camps until the end of war, they both survived. There was also love in
Edie‘s life – her first love Eric who she was waiting before they were both sent to
Auschwitz, unfortunately he died a day before liberation and Béla Eger, her husband. With
Béla she had 3 children – Marianne, Audrey and John. And at last, there were some
historical figures as well – Dr. Joseph Mengele – a doctor in Auschwitz for who Edie danced
the first night at camp and Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, also a holocaust survivor and Edie‘s
good friend.

The pain of Dr. Eger’s story is hard to fathom. Nearly her entire family, all Hungarian
Jews, died in Auschwitz when she was 16 years old. Dr. Eger was an accomplished ballerina
and was once made to dance before Josef Mengele, the SS doctor who was nicknamed
“Angel of Death” for torturing Auschwitz inmates in the name of scientific observation. He
gave her a loaf of rye bread after she finished dancing, which she tore up and shared with
her bunkmates.

The book is divided into four sections: Prison, Escape, Freedom, and Healing. The last two
sections describe how Dr. Eger eventually stops running from her past and embraces it. She
is given a copy of “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frankl in her undergraduate
studies and through him, she eventually finds the permission and the words to speak her
truth. Frankl became a mentor and friend to Dr. Eger until he died in 1997.

What sets Dr. Eger’s book apart from other Holocaust memoirs is best summed up in the
forward, written by her colleague and friend Philip Zimbardo, PhD.

“…Her book is so much more than another Shoah memoir, as important as such
stories are for remembering the past. Her goal is nothing less than to help each
of us to escape the prisons of our own minds….it is Edie’s mission to help us
realize that just as we can act as our own jailers, we can also be our own
liberators.”
Dr. Eger becomes a psychologist and begins to practice, finding pieces of her own trauma
in her patients. To the spouses in crisis, to the girl with eating disorders, to the Vietnam
veteran with PTSD. And as she gives them permission to heal, she gives permission to
herself as well.

In the final section of the book, Dr. Eger delivers an address in Berghopf, Hitler’s private
palace. She tells the crowd:

“Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of
smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the
end–these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares…The past isn’t
gone…it lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I
lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see
freedom because I learned to forgive.”

As Dr. Eger writes, “Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal
is to cherish the wound.” This book is singular because of how Dr. Eger doesn’t once
diminish the experiences of those who haven’t suffered as she suffered. She finds the
commonality in all our pain, and gives people tools to own their part in their healing.

Thirty-Five years after the war ended Edie returned to Auschwitz and was finally able to
fully heal and forgive the one person she’d been unable to forgive for years. Not Hitler. Not
Josef Mengele. Herself.

She is 96 now and still treats her patients with the help of her children and grandchildren.