Book Review #1 – “The Choice” by Dr. Edith Eva Eger (post is in process and incomplete at thi time)

Book Review #1 – “The Choice” by Dr. Edith Eva Eger.

Published by SCRIBNER, 1917; 275 pages.

“The Choice is a powerful, moving memoir, and a practical guide to healing, written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experience as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients and guide them toward freedom from trauma, grief, and fear. One of the few living Holocaust survivors to remember the horrors of the camps, Edie has chosen to forgive her captors and find joy in her life every day. The Choice weaves her personal story with case studies from her work as a psychologist. Her patients and their stories illustrate different phases of healing and show how people can choose to escape the prisons they construct in their minds and find freedom, regardless of circumstance. Eger’s story is an inspiration for everyone.” (excerpt from the Introduction).

An Overview of Dr. Eger’s Life Story: 

• Born in Budapest, Hungary on 9-19-27. Her father was a tailor, and could be brutal, even to the point of beating Edith up with his fists when she was 13 years old.
• She trained as a ballerina and gymnast from five years old, and was accomplished enough to earn a spot on the Olympic team. She was expelled from the Olympic team when it was discovered she was Jewish. While a young teenager, she ws force to wear a yellow star as Jewish identification.
• Raised an Orthodox Jew in her family, she was taken from her home in the middle of the night as a 16 year old, and taken straight to Auschwitz, where both parents were immediately killed. Upon exiting the cattle car at the death camp, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele determined who went to work and who went to the crematorium. Edith went to work with her sister. She was imprisoned there for many months, tortured, starved, with constant death threats. Dr. Mengele only let her live so she could dance ballet before him while listening to his favorite classical music.
• Dr. Mengele, upon meeting each cattle car full of Jews with a smiling and friendly face, decided to send the following Jews to the crematorium: women with young children, the disabled, the unhealthy, those younger than 14 years and older than forty.
• The last words Edith heard from her mother was, “Just remember, Edith, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your own mind.“
• While in Auschwitz, Edith was routinely starved, brought into the showers not knowing if she would see water or gas, and made to donate blood for transfusions for wounded Nazi soldiers.
• After six months in Auschwitz, she and her sister were transferred to a work camp in Germany and almost worked to death.
• After many weeks at the work camp, she was again transferred to a brutal prison camp where most Jews were dying of exposure, bullets or starvation. She became deathly sick here with high fever and delirium, but couldn’t tell anyone because she would have been immediately executed.
• Soon later she was taken to a stone quarry that was a work camp with a crematorium. She was soon taken on a death march to another work camp in which only 100 survived out of over 2,000 prisoners. Disease was rampant, and she could only eat grass for the little food they were given. It was discovered at this time that she somehow had suffered a broken back, but she wasn’t aware of how she had been injured to that degree.
• In May of 1945, Edith was then considered as good as dead, so she was thrown onto a big stack of dead bodies to await a group burial. She saw a group of American jeeps filled with soldiers approach the camp to release all these imprisoned by the Nazi’s in that camp, but she could not raise her hand to answer a soldier’s question, “Are there any living here? Raise your hand if you can do so!” The soldiers walked right by her as she lay paralyzed. But she was holding an old sardine can that reflected the sunlight in a way that got the soldier’s attention, and he returned to her lying there helpless. He noticed that she was still alive, so the soldier lifts her out of the stack of dead bodies and rescues Edith, along with her sister. Edith weighed 70 pounds at this time, literally skin and bones, and she was unable to walk or lift her arms.
• Edith and her sister were then taken to a German family willing to help them recover, remaining for forty days in all.
• From there, they were able to return to their old home to search for their sister, and were ecstatic to find her alive. Out of 15,000 Jews deported from their home town, only 70 survived. They discovered that the Nazi’s had used their old apartment for a horse stable, and so the floors were all covered with horse manure.
• After extensive cleaning, they were able to remain in their old apartment while looking for a way to earn their daily bread. Edith was still unable to walk and needed to be spoon-fed by her sisters.
• Finally she was taken to the local hospital and she was diagnosed with typhoid fever, pneumonia, pleurisy, and the unhealed broken back. She could barely breathe and all her hair had fallen out.
• Edith eventually married another Holocaust survivor, but they had to flee together to America (Texas) when the communists were expelling Jews from Europe. They had three children together but eventually divorced. At this time she earned her Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology, established her own clinic, and specialized in caring for and healing those with PTSD and other traumatic conditions. All this time, she had refused to confront her own horrific experiences in any significant way, until she met with a fellow Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl.
• Edith spent many years in therapy but overcame her woundedness, especially after her willingness to visit Auschwitz in 1990.

In a Nutshell. Edith believed that every person who has undergone a trauma has a choice to make… You can be either a survivor or a victim. Victimhood is optional, and no one can make someone else a victim unless they submit to that status. Every person can live into either their victimization or their resilience. Each person must choose freedom from the wounds of the past, or a jail of their making in their mind. Each person has the choice of going from “trauma to triumph.”

Thoughts on Her Faith in God: “I’ve never felt it difficult to see that it isn’t God who is killing us in gas chambers, in ditches, on cliff sides. God doesn’t run the death camps. People do.” “People asked where was God, but I always say that God was with me! The Nazi guards were prisoners too. I prayed for them. I turned hatred into pity. I never told anyone that they were spending their days murdering people. What kind of life was that for them? They had been brainwashed. Their own youth had been taken away from them.” 

Thoughts on Unconditional Love.