The book entitled The Choice is sitting on my coffee table. The one that never has coffee cups on it. I gulped it down in one day, because there was nothing on my calendar that pulled me harder than those pages. Dr. Edith Eger is a Holocaust survivor, and she writes of that experience in a way that made me both want to read as fast as I could, and as slowly as possible. Perhaps I will simply have to start again.

She was a young girl in Hungary, when the oppression squeezed the life out of her family until they were as shriveled as a forgotten potato. Edie lost most of the people she loved, and clung to her sister as they endured the unthinkable. Being together was a paper thin shield, and yet it seems it was enough. Barely.

Like the man who later became her mentor, Viktor Frankl, Dr. Eger eventually found the thread of meaning in her suffering. Each time she chose a fragment of hope over despair, or forgiveness over revenge, it seems that circumstances guided her past certain death. Like the time she was ordered to dance for a soldier, the one who held her future as carelessly as he would a broken dish. Or the time she was peeling vegetables for the guards, and stuffed the scraps in her pocket to stave off hunger. Or the time she dared to steal carrots from a farmer's fields. 

Edie coined the choice as being between evolving and revolving. When I was little it was marvelous to spin around in those big glass doors at the entrance of a department store, or the airport. Never getting anywhere. But eventually my mother would tug my hand to keep walking and I would glance back to see the doors turn without me. As a therapist Dr. Eger tries to help people who are stuck in repetitive gyrations of regret, or anger, or depression. Surely she of all people has reason enough to obsess over the humiliations and terror of a place like Auschwitz. Yet she has come to believe that there is another door waiting for her. Evolution. 

The climax of the book is when she is invited to be the keynote speaker for a conference of military chaplains. Except that it takes place in the city where her childhood was torn from her. 

After her speech she walks across the fields, now green with fresh grass. It is a Jewish tradition to place a rock at the grave of the dead, to show respect and to offer a blessing. She reaches down and picks up a small, gray stone. It symbolizes her devotion to her parents, as well as the embodiment of the grief that has held her prisoner for half a lifetime. 

"Hitler didn't win," she tells her husband as he holds her hand. Placing the stone down she leaves behind the life that wasn't, and embraces the one that is. 

"The past doesn't taint the present. The present doesn't diminish the past."