Description
The temptation, with books like this, is to read for permission, permission to feel less stuck, less bitter, less injured by what was done to us. Eger writes against that temptation and also supplies a great deal of it. The pull and the resistance, more than any single argument she makes, is what the book is about.
Edith Eva Eger was sixteen when she was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. Her parents were killed on arrival. She and her sister Magda survived the camps, a death march, and Gunskirchen, where she was found in a pile of bodies by an American soldier who noticed her hand moving. She later became a clinical psychologist. The Choice braids her own story with case studies from her practice, structured around a conviction she shares with Viktor Frankl: that even in the worst conditions, the inner choice (how we respond) remains ours.
The strongest pages are the camp pages. Eger writes about extremity without ornament. “There is always a worse hell. That is our reward for living,” she observes at Gunskirchen, and the line earns its bleak compression. When she describes being too weak to walk, watching a starving man eat human flesh, deciding she will eat grass instead — “I will choose this blade of grass over that one. I will occupy my mind with the choice. This is what it means to choose” — the framework gets its most ferocious meaning. I read those pages on a bus ride and missed my stop. Choice here is not freedom in any abstract sense; it is attention, the tiny, almost involuntary motion of the mind that decides not to die yet.
What happens when this idea travels from Auschwitz to the therapy office in El Paso is the question the book never quite settles. Eger sees patients — an army captain ready to murder his wife, an anorexic teenager, a colonel who calls his daughter a slut and his son a sissy — and offers them versions of the same insight. We always have a choice. Suffering becomes optional once we take responsibility for our response to it. The case studies are tender and observant. They are also almost identical in arc. Patient arrives broken. Eger names what the patient could not. Patient chooses differently. Patient heals. The framework wins every round.
This is where I started to push back. Not against the framework, which is in the relevant sense true, but against the way the book deploys it. Every therapeutic encounter resolves. The patients who didn’t choose freedom, who couldn’t, who left her office still stuck, are largely absent from the page. Eger’s own setbacks she names with disarming honesty: she admits to being passive-aggressive with her husband, to hiding her past from her children, to nearly drowning herself in diet pills and an affair in her forties. Her patients’ failures rarely make the manuscript. The result is a book whose evidence base is, by selection, evidence for itself.
There’s a related worry underneath. The book’s authority leans hard on Eger’s own survival. She is here to tell us; it worked for her. But the claim that everyone always retains the freedom to choose their response is harder to verify in those who didn’t make it back. Eger is too sharp not to feel this. Once, in a sentence that lingers, she lets the door open: “And yet. (This ‘and yet’ opening like a door.) How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret… How easily we can cling to — worship — the choices we think we could or should have made.” The “and yet” is the book at its most honest. The book is most trustworthy when it sits in the gap between what choice can repair and what it cannot.
Eger’s most famous formulation is that if survivors of atrocity remain imprisoned by bitterness, “then Hitler won.” It is rhetorically irresistible and ethically slippery. The phrase locates the work of healing inside the victim, which is partly accurate, partly necessary, and partly a quiet way of letting circumstance off the hook. A reader in real pain may notice the small additional weight this places on them — that an inability to choose freedom is itself a kind of failure.
What survives the skepticism is the book’s specific gift: Eger does not pretend to be done. Decades after liberation, she still ducks at sirens. Her daughter, who learned this from her without being taught, ducks too. The book that wants to teach us we are free is also a book that documents how much of unfreedom passes invisibly from one body to another.
The image that won’t leave me isn’t the grass, or the dance under Mengele’s eye, or the moment she said “mother” instead of “sister” and sent her own mother to the showers. It’s the loaded gun she took from Captain Fuller and forgot in a filing cabinet for years.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.