The Choice by Edith Eger review: Inspirational story of surviving Auschwitz

The Choice by Edith Eger (Rider, £14.99)

The exhausted women are herself, her sister and her mother and the yard is outside Auschwitz. Her mother will soon be dead and the siblings will be “an anatomy lesson. Elbows, knees, ankles, cheeks, knuckles, ribs jut out like questions. What are we now?… We are trauma in motion.”

She was near death when an American soldier plucked her from a pile of bodies. She then had to work out how to live a life, after all that she had seen, all that she had suffered. She married, moved to America, had children but she was still haunted. “A sudden sight, a particular smell, can transport me back to the past.”

With indomitable spirit, she trained as a psychologist and was determined to help others come to terms with the trauma and pain in their lives. This inspirational book movingly describes the story of her survival, her healing process and “the stories of the precious people I’ve had the privilege of guiding to freedom”. 

It is a reflection of her philosophy, which explores the way we can think about the events that befall us: “We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible.”