Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by Edith Eger
Edith Eger was sixteen when she arrived at Auschwitz. That night she danced for Josef Mengele. She survived, moved to Texas, and at fifty earned a doctorate in clinical psychology, then spent decades helping other people out of the prisons they had built in their own minds. She has written three books: a memoir, a book of lessons, and a retelling of her story for younger readers. The first two are essential.
By Lisanne Swart · 3 books · Memoir · Psychology · Updated October 2026
Memoir
The Choice
Eger was a sixteen-year-old ballet student in Kassa when her family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Her mother was sent to the gas chamber on the day they arrived; that same evening Josef Mengele made her dance for him. She and her sister Magda survived a death march and were found alive at Gunskirchen in May 1945. The book is not mainly a Holocaust memoir, though. It is about the decades afterwards: emigrating to America, keeping the past secret, earning a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1978, at fifty, and learning, slowly, to stop being a prisoner of what had happened. Her own story runs alongside the stories of the patients she has treated.
One of the most important books I have read about the relationship between suffering and freedom. Eger writes about her experience without sentimentality and without false resolution. The clinical sections, where her work as a therapist runs alongside her own story, give the memoir an unusual depth. It is not just a story of survival. It is a guide to becoming free.
Psychology · Read second
The Gift
Eger’s second book moves from memoir into practice. Each of the twelve chapters addresses a psychological prison she has seen in herself and her patients, among them victimhood, avoidance, self-neglect, rigidity and resentment, and offers a way out. It draws on her own story but is fundamentally about the reader. Less narrative than The Choice and more directly therapeutic, which makes it a different kind of useful.
If The Choice shows you who Eger is, The Gift shows you what she actually does with people. Her approach as a therapist is warm, precise and occasionally ruthless; she has very little patience for the stories we tell ourselves to avoid change. This is the book to read when you are ready to do something with what The Choice stirred up.
Memoir · For younger readers
The Ballerina of Auschwitz
Her story retold for readers of all ages, from teenagers up: her life as a young dancer in Hungary, Auschwitz, and the hard years after liberation, told closer to the voice of her sixteen-year-old self, with first love and her bond with her sisters given more room. The publisher describes about thirty per cent of it as new material.
What to read next
If Eger’s work stayed with you, these go deeper into the same territory: trauma and the body, making meaning after loss, and the long work of becoming free. Start with her friend Viktor Frankl; every book by Viktor Frankl is on one page.
Authors like Authors Like Edith Eger Writers who turn suffering into understanding.
Reading list Books Like Man’s Search for Meaning The philosophy behind everything she writes.
Reading list The Best Books on Trauma Twelve books on what happened to us, and what helps.
Frequently asked questions about Edith Eger’s books
From the bookshelf
“The biggest concentration camp is in your own mind. And the key is in your pocket.” — Edith Eger
If her books stayed with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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