The Choice

In The Choice the psychologist, Edith Eger, describes how at sixteen her mother, father and sister were rounded up in Hungary during the Second World War and sent to Auschwitz. They were Jews. When they arrived, the three women linked arms as they queued to reach Dr Mengele who was despatching people left and right. Left meant the gas chamber and right meant life, for a while at any rate. In answering the question: Is this your mother?' she innocently condemned her mother to death, and has had to live with that for the rest of her life. Later, in the camp, she describes having to dance for Mengele, and other terrible, terrible experiences. Somehow or other, she and her sister survived. In her extraordinary book, Eger explains how, after the war, her experiences in the camp (not surprisingly) caused her to shut down, be angry and stuck and how, painstakingly, she found a way to free herself from the prison' of her own mind. But much more than this, she shows with so much honesty, tenderness and warmth how we too can see the difficulties, the losses and the hurts of our own lives in a different way, and choose to be free of them.