The Choice: Embrace the Possible

In 1944, sixteen-year-old Edith Eger was sent with her family from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her parents were murdered on arrival and she survived by dancing for the camp doctor Josef Mengele. The Choice moves through her time in the camps, a death march, and the moment American soldiers found her barely alive in a pile of bodies at Gunskirchen. The second half of the memoir follows the decades after, as Eger emigrated to the United States, raised a family, and became a clinical psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress. Drawing on her own recovery and her patients' stories, she argues that suffering is unavoidable but that a person can choose how to carry it. The book blends survivor testimony with the insight of a therapist who spent her life helping others heal.