Yes. It is a memoir, not a novel. Eger was born Edith Elefánt in Košice in 1927, was deported in May 1944, survived Auschwitz, Mauthausen and a death march to Gunskirchen, and was found alive among the dead by an American soldier in May 1945. The clinical cases in the later chapters are drawn from her own practice, with patients’ identities changed.

Edith Eva Eger (1927–2026) was a Hungarian-born Jewish psychologist and author. She survived Auschwitz as a teenager, emigrated to the United States, earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1978, and ran a practice in La Jolla, California, specialising in post-traumatic stress. She wrote three books and died in San Diego on 27 April 2026, aged 98.

She arrived in May 1944 with her parents and her sister Magda. Josef Mengele separated her from her mother on the ramp; her mother was killed that day, as was her father. Mengele later ordered Eger to dance for him, and she has described dancing with her eyes closed, imagining a stage. She and Magda stayed together through the camp, a transfer to Mauthausen and a death march to Gunskirchen. Her fiancé Eric did not survive. Her sisters Klara and Magda did.

Not the choice of what happens to you. Eger is explicit that she had no choice about the camp, and she is hostile to any reading that makes survival a matter of willpower. What she means is narrower and harder: the response is yours, it is available at any point, and postponing it is itself a choice. She spent roughly forty years postponing it, which is why the book spends so long on the years after the war rather than the year inside it.

It is both, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. Roughly the first third is memoir; the rest moves between her own recovery and her patients’ cases, with the structure of a clinical argument. Readers who want only testimony sometimes find the therapeutic chapters intrusive; readers who come for the psychology sometimes underestimate how unsparing the camp chapters are. It helps to know that before you start.

Readers who want an account of recovery that does not skip the part where it fails. It is useful for anyone carrying something they have decided not to look at, and for anyone interested in how trauma is actually treated rather than how it is talked about. It is not a gentle book and it is not a fast one.

The camp chapters are hard, though Eger is restrained rather than graphic — she reports what happened without lingering. The harder parts for many readers are the later ones, where she describes years of panic, avoidance and self-deception in a marriage and a life that looked fine from outside. Take it slowly. It is not a book that rewards finishing quickly.

Eger knew Viktor Frankl’s work, corresponded with him and has named him as an influence, and the two books share a core claim: that meaning is available even in extremity. The differences matter, though. Frankl writes as a psychiatrist looking outward at other prisoners; Eger writes as a patient who became a psychiatrist’s counterpart forty years later. Frankl’s book is short and argumentative. Eger’s is long, personal and much more willing to show the author getting it wrong.

The Choice (2017) is the memoir. The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (2020) is the practical follow-up — shorter, organised around twelve patterns she calls mental prisons, built from her clinical work rather than her biography. Read The Choice first; The Gift assumes you know where she is speaking from.

The Ballerina of Auschwitz (2024) is Eger’s third book, a young-adult retelling of the same story for a younger readership. It covers the deportation and the camp with the memoir’s material reshaped as a narrative. If you are buying for a teenager, that is the edition to look for rather than The Choice.

She married Béla Eger in 1945, was imprisoned briefly under the communist government in Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with her family to the United States, settling first in Baltimore and later in Texas. She worked in a factory. She began studying in her forties, finished her doctorate in clinical psychology in 1978, and built a practice in La Jolla treating veterans, abuse survivors and families. She also worked with the US military on post-traumatic stress.

No. Edith Eger died on 27 April 2026 in San Diego, California, at the age of 98. She had continued speaking and writing into her nineties; her last book, The Ballerina of Auschwitz, appeared in 2024.

The Scribner edition runs to 304 pages (ISBN 978-1501130786). UK editions from Rider and Ebury run slightly shorter. There is also an audiobook, and the young-adult retelling, The Ballerina of Auschwitz, is shorter again.