The Choice
Finding freedom
Edith Eger, a Czechoslovakian Jew, was only sixteen when, in 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz. She was sent on death marches and into forced slave labour, where she endured unimaginable horrors, starvation and brutality. She was made a human shield for Nazi ammunition in a thin striped dress lying on top of German trains. And finally, emaciated and infested, she was left for dead in a pile of bodies.
After her liberation it took years for her to work through the trauma and damage and guilt, overcoming enormous obstacles – both external and internal – to become an acclaimed psychologist and psychotherapist.
Her book,The Choice, (written with co-author, Esme Schwall Weigand) is not simply another account of survival during the Holocaust. That’s a profound and powerful part of it, but Dr Eger weaves her own personal experiences together with clinical cases where, in her professional capacity, she has used the wisdom she gained to help her patients to confront their suffering and free themselves from the shackles that imprison their minds. And in the process she finds her own redemption.
She writes stories:
…stories of choices, big and small, that can lead us from trauma to triumph, from darkness to light, from imprisonment to freedom.
She shares deep and wise insights:
Suffering is universal. Victimhood is optional.
There is no hierarchy of suffering.
Our painful experiences aren’t a liability – they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
It’s not what happens that matters – it’s what you do with it.
She has high ambitions:
…to help you escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be.
…to experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief – and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life.
She knows her own limitations:
Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end – these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or exised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.
She has arrived at a most important perspective:
…the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are – human, imperfect, and whole.
Revisiting Auschwitz, she discovers a profound anomaly:
This is the geometry of systematic torture and death. Mathematical annihilation.
The immensity crushes.
There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory.
Here in the world’s biggest cemetery there is not one single grave.
A colleague, Professor Philip Zimbardo, sums up the reach of The Choice:
…extraordinary chronicle of heroism and healing, resiliency and compassion, survival with dignity, mental toughness, and moral courage. All of us can learn from Dr Eger’s inspiring cases and riveting personal story to heal our own lives.
Critical reading
A couple of months ago someone gave me a book with the comment: ‘I think this is your kind of thing.’
Well, I can see her point.
The said novel deals with or skirts around an impressive number of meaty issues: inherited diseases, fatal illness, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, assisted death, parental loss and grief, infertility, infanticide, child abduction, cot death … My kind of subjects.
It has the strap line: It’s every mother’s worst nightmare … My kind of hook.
The blurb on the back cover lets me know that it’s about tragedy striking a young mother, it’s a tear-jerker, and involves secrets and betrayal … My kind of storyline. In fact it’s about a baby with a rare recessive gene disorder and all that that implies: an angle I even used in one of my own novels, Paternity, some ten years ago. So, yes indeed, it does sound like my kind of reading.
What then was this book? The Choice by Susan Lewis.
I’ve been pegging away fairly relentlessly at my own writing and marketing and publicity tasks (yawn yawn) so I decided to take a break and a little light relief on Monday and Tuesday this week. The Choice was top of my tbr pile.
It kept me turning the pages certainly, I wanted to know how things panned out for Nikki and Spence and their baby, what dark secret Nikki’s parents were harbouring. But I was itching to edit it! I guess, constantly revising my own writing has made me ultra-critical and nitpicky. Throughout to book, my own editor’s advice was ringing in my ears: lose another third; cut out all the bits you’re especially proud of; is that character fully earning her keep?; what’s that secondary story line contributing? make sure all your facts tally … Cut, cut, cut. Edit, edit, edit. She would have had me reduce that 532 pages to 252! But in truth Susan Lewis has published 30 books and established a resounding reputation, She needs no endorsement from me!
The book served my purpose, however. Thanks to a break away reading someone else’s work, I can return to my own writing with renewed enthusiasm.