The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger– 304 pages
Book Blurb:
Edith Eger was sixteen years old when the Nazis came to her hometown in Hungary and took her Jewish family to an interment center and then to Auschwitz. Her parents were sent to the gas chamber by Joseph Mengele soon after they arrived at the camp. Hours later Mengele demanded that Edie dance a waltz to “The Blue Danube” and rewarded her with a loaf of bread that she shared with her fellow prisoners. These women later helped save Edie’s life. Edie and her sister survived Auschwitz, were transferred to the Mauthausen and Gunskirchen camps in Austria, and managed to live until the American troops liberated the camps in 1945 and found Edie in a pile of dying bodies.
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. Years after she was liberated from the concentration camps Edie went back to college to study psychology. She combines her clinical knowledge and her own experiences with trauma to help others who have experienced painful events large and small. Dr. Eger has counselled veterans suffering from PTSD, women who were abused, and many others who learned that they too, can choose to forgive, find resilience, and move forward. She lectures frequently on the power of love and healing.
My Review: 5 stars
The Choice: Embrace the Possible is a Holocaust memoir, but amazingly, it’s just as inspirational as it is terrifying.
Seriously, this is a MUST READ. The author suffered extensively during the war, yet through years of immense personal introspection and her inherent ability to find joy, she found her way to forgiveness. She shares her own journey of therapy, as a patient and as a doctor herself, to make it relatable to a myriad of circumstances. There is nothing preachy about this book. She just has a way of sharing her wisdom with eloquence, mindfulness and love.
Writing a book at ninety years old is a feat in itself, making the words inside so damn important is just astounding. I practically dog-eared the entirety of the book and had to be quite choosy in which quotes I selected for the section below. Just read this book, give it as a gift and hold tight to the lessons and memories of this phenomenal woman.
Quotes I liked:
Bad things, I am afraid, happen to everyone. This we can’t change. If you look at your birth certificate, does it say life will be easy? It does not. But so many of us remain stuck in a trauma or grief, unable to experience our lives fully. This we can change.”
-“It’s the first time I see hat we a have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.”
-“Magda’s civil disobedience makes her feel like the author of choice, not the victim of fate.”
-“It is terrible to lose, to have lost, all the known things: mother, father, sister, boyfriend, country home. Why do I have to lose the things I know too? Why do I have to lose the future? My potential? The children I’ll never mother? The wedding dress my father will never make? I’m going to die a virgin. I don’t want this to my last thought. I should think about G-d.”
– “What if telling my story could lighten its grip instead of tightening it? What if speaking about the past could heal it instead of calcify it? What if silence and denial aren’t the only choices to make n the wake of a catastrophic loss?”
-“When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened-we grieve for what didn’t happen. I housed a vacant, empty place, the vast dark of the life that would never be. I held the trauma and the absence, I couldn’t let go of either piece of my truth, nor could I hold either easily. “
-“When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life.”
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