The Choice

Psychologist Edith Eva Eger combines memoir with case studies from her clinical work. She was sixteen when the Nazis came to her Hungarian hometown and deported her Jewish family, first to an internment center, then on to Auschwitz, where Joseph Mengele sent her parents to the gas chamber soon after arrival. Ordered by Mengele to dance a waltz, she was rewarded with bread, which she divided among fellow prisoners. She and her sister lived through transfers to Mauthausen and Gunskirchen in Austria until American troops liberated the camps in 1945. Years later Eger studied psychology, and she has counselled veterans with PTSD and abused women; her patients' stories illustrate stages of healing.

Morgan Housel called it possibly the best book he had read in years, the true account of a young Hungarian girl who endured a year of torture and starvation after her parents were murdered on arrival at Auschwitz.