The Choice: Embrace the Possible

This book is partly a memoir and partly a guide to processing trauma. Eger was only sixteen years old when she and her family got sent to Auschwitz. After surviving unbelievable horrors, she moved to the United States and became a therapist. Her unique background gives her amazing insight, and I think many people will find comfort right now from her suggestions on how to handle difficult situations.

Maybe the best book I’ve read in years. The true story of a young Hungarian girl sent to Auschwitz where her parents are murdered upon arrival but who manages to survive a year of torture and starvation before being liberated. After the war she moves to America, gets a PhD in psychology, and becomes a therapist who understands the psychology of trauma better than anyone. Just epic writing and storytelling, hard to put down.

A beautiful memoir, reminiscent of the great works of Anne Frank and Viktor Frankl. But it is more than a book—it is a work of art. It gave me goosebumps, the kind that graces you in transcendent moments of appreciating a Mozart sonata, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Edith’s strength and courage are remarkable in this memoir as she draws on her own unthinkable experience in Nazi concentration camps to become a therapist and help others recover from all kinds of hardship. Her life and work are an incredible example of forgiveness, resilience and generosity.

The Choice will be an extraordinary book on heroism, healing, resiliency, compassion, survival with dignity, mental toughness, and moral courage. It will appeal to millions of people who can learn from Dr. Eger’s inspiring cases and shocking personal story as well as her profound clinical wisdom to heal their lives.

We brought Dr. Eger to work with our most troubled military personnel—people grappling with the most intense emotional scars from their experience in battle. Dr. Eger is a healer of the highest order. Personally, I have learned from this gifted human being, this indomitable survivor, this accomplished therapist more about humanity—and suffering—and resilience, than all my advanced degrees put together. Dr. Eger has informed and inspired me more than any other role model in my practice of thirty years. This effervescent, brawny, octogenarian has more than a story to tell, a therapy to offer, a journey to guide; she brings us to a new way of being.

The Choice is a gift to humanity. One of those rare and eternal stories that you don't want to end and that leave you forever changed. Dr. Eger's life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others. She has found true freedom and forgiveness and shows us how we can as well.