Review by the wonderful Samantha Edwards from our blog team.
Spanning decades and continents, Dr Edith Eger’s beautifully told memoir takes readers on a journey through the challenges and triumphs of life as a genocide victim and Holocaust survivor. From Auschwitz to America and eventually Australia, Eger is now a great-grandmother and has built her life around helping and inspiring people as a psychologist and motivational speaker.
In 1939, the scents of war crept into Eger’s hometown of Košice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia). By 1944 the Eger family, along with much of the Jewish population, had been sent to the concentration camps. The war put an abrupt end to Eger’s childhood, forcing her and her eldest sister to fend for themselves amidst the cruelty and unrelenting hardships of war even after liberation from Auschwitz. They overcame the challenges of war aided by their unconditional love and combined physical and mental strength, emerging alive, if not unscathed.
While she doesn’t claim to be anything special, Eger clearly possesses an extraordinary resilience and strength, evident in her retrospective and meditative view of the horrific ordeals she endured. ‘The Choice’ is not a quest for sympathy, but an attempt to answer the question that she and her clients (and her readers, undoubtedly) continually face. “What now?” was a question that loomed over Eger after the war took away the future she had dreamed of. It took her many years to discover that her past could coexist with, rather than shape and influence, her future. Eger has subsequently decided that the answer is to keep going, to never give up and to work hard to become the person you want to become.
Eger weaves stories of her clients into her own – all of them at significant but vulnerable points in their lives. No matter how different she is from each of these people and their beliefs, she reasons that “each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom* within us”. Regardless of how broken, violent, racist or shut off they are, Eger is endlessly loving and accepting, able to find, as she calls it, her ‘inner Hitler’ or access their Boom and relate to and help them all.
Eger has filled her book with such heavy content and yet so many subtleties and beautiful accounts of courage and success – both her own and of others – that I was immediately drawn into the stories and people she illustrates. Soon after finishing, I reread the book because I’d been so caught up in the story that I felt I hadn’t fully grasped what Eger aimed to convey. I often found myself forgetting that she was telling the story of her life and that the scenes she described were true events she witnessed and experienced. This is by no means a fault of Eger – in fact it is a credit to her writing that she could make her confronting story so palatable and compelling.
When asked to name my favourite book, I don’t immediately think of Eger’s memoir. However, after further reflection, The Choice must certainly feature highly on my list of favourites. It has a bit of everything – story-telling, deep reflection, hard-hitting truths and a license for individual interpretation – and should be on any good reading list. I’ve already read it twice and I can guarantee I’ll be going back for more.
* Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom (1892-1983) worked with her family members to help many Jews escape the Holocaust by hiding them in her home (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_Boom).