The Choice - Edith Eger

This weekend I read The Choice by Edith Eger and it was profoundly moving and uplifting. The memoir begins in 1944 when Edith is just sixteen years old, a ballerina and gymnast, is taken with her sister and mother to Auschwitz. She recounts the heartbreaking moment her mother is directed into a separate queue, one which will lead her immediately to the shower block. Edith is then ordered to dance, by none other than the infamous Josef Mengele. She performs a ballet routine for him, knowing full well that her mother is dead and she is helpless. There are no words to describe how moving this novel is, as Edith recalls the most hellish moments that a person could ever endure.

After over a year of imprisonment, and clinging to life with various diseases including pneumonia as well as a broken back, Edith is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive, by their American liberators. Once she returns to her hometown, she must learn to walk again, and recover from the illnesses that plague her frail and skeletal body. I won't divulge too much of the plot, because I sincerely urge anyone to read this novel and experience the emotions that go along with reading it.

One of the things I particularly loved about this novel was the breadth of life it covered, as the 2017 novel was published when Edith was ninety years old, and her remarkable life is shared within its pages. Unlike similar novels about the holocaust, such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which I also recently read and reviewed on my blog, the novel chooses not to focus solely on the events of the imprisonment but also Edith's life after this experience. Whereas Heather Morris focused almost entirely on Lale's experience in the concentration camp, with a brief section at the end detailing his life subsequent to this, Edith chooses not to let the experience define her whole life and recounts her many years of study and the growth of her family after the war was over.

Edith's incredible life unfolds to reveal her study for a doctorate in psychology later in life, and the talks she gives to war veterans suffering from trauma, drawing on her own experiences in Auschwitz. This is one of those rare novels that has the power to make you feel incredibly uplifted, despite its horrific content, and I really didn't want it to end. By the end, we learn about the now four generations of Edith's family, remarkably, considering the young girl who was pulled from a pile of corpses, clinging to life. I will treasure this novel and give it pride of place on my shelf, as one of the most inspirational and amazing life stories I have ever read. Five stars aren't enough!