The Ballerina of Auschwitz: Young Adult Edition of The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

Overview

A Sydney Taylor Award Notable Young Adult Book

In this “luminous” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) young adult edition of the bestselling, award-winning memoir The Choice, Holocaust survivor and renowned psychologist Dr. Edith Eva Eger shares her harrowing experiences and gives readers the gift of hope and strength.

Edie is a talented dancer and a skilled gymnast with hopes of making the Olympic team. Between her rigorous training and her struggle to find her place in a family where she’s the daughter “with brains but no looks,” Edie’s too busy to dwell on the state of the world. But life in Hungary in 1943 is dangerous for a Jewish girl.

Just as Edie falls in love for the first time, Europe collapses into war, and Edie’s family is forced onto a train bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp. Even in those darkest of moments, Edie’s beloved, Eric, kindles hope. “I’ll never forget your eyes,” he tells her through the slats of the cattle car. Auschwitz is horrifying beyond belief, yet through starvation, unthinkable terrors, and daily humiliations like being forced to dance for a Nazi leader, dreams of Eric sustain Edie. Against all odds, Edie and her sister Magda survive, thanks to their sisterhood and sheer grit.

Edie returns home filled with grief and guilt. Survival feels more like a burden than a gift—until Edie recognizes that she has a choice. She can’t change the past, but she can choose how to live and even to love again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665952552
Publisher:	Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	79,846
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Edith Eva Eger is an eminent psychologist and one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors old enough to remember life in the camps. A colleague of Viktor Frankl, Dr. Edith Eger has worked with veterans, military personnel, and victims of physical and mental trauma. She lives in La Jolla, California, and is the author of the bestselling and award-winning books The Choice and The Gift. The Ballerina of Auschwitz, the young adult edition of The Choice, was named a Sydney Taylor Award Notable Young Adult Book. Edie and her daughter, Marianne Engle—a renowned psychologist and food writer who helped develop the recipes in The Gift—encourage you to try the delicious dishes in the book and share your thoughts at [e-mail].

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2024

Gr 8 Up—At age 96, Dr. Eger tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring Holocaust survivor story in this YA version of her 2017 autobiography The Choice. In fewer than 200 pages, she takes readers through a present tense telling of how, as ethnic Jewish Hungarians in what became Czechoslovakia, her family was sent to labor and death camps. This image begins and ends her story: Eger at age 16, her sister Magda, and their mother huddled together in line as they arrive at Auschwitz and Josef Mengele sends her mother to the left, to the gas chambers. The first-person, present tense narration compels readers to live moment by moment of Eger's one-and-a-half years of horror at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Gunskirchen. Eger beautifully portrays liberation and returning to the world of the living. Dancing is the thread that holds her life together—the powerful gymnast and ballerina skills she learns as a young person, her dance to "The Blue Danube" at Auschwitz, and her return to dancing as she learns to live again. Eger's reflections of suffering and seeds of hope are directly and beautifully wrought; the author's note reaches out to readers who are coping with pain and suffering in this modern age. The book does not have a time line, glossary, or historical overview; readers will benefit from some knowledge of the Holocaust. VERDICT Urging readers to always choose freedom, this is an important personal telling of Holocaust suffering and survival. A solid purchase for collections with Holocaust interest and studies.—Jamie Winchell

School Library Journal

★ 2024-08-03
A memoir of one teen’s experiences in Auschwitz and rebuilding in the aftermath of war, adapted from the 2017 adult edition.

Edith was the youngest of three daughters in an ethnically Hungarian Jewish family in a Czechoslovakian town. She trained as a gymnast and made plans beyond high school with her sweetheart, Eric. Edith was 16 in 1944 when all appearances of normalcy were torn away, and Jewish families were crowded onto trains destined for Auschwitz. Her parents were killed on arrival at the camp. Edith and her oldest sister, Magda, labored amid horrific conditions and uncountable deaths. Dreams of reuniting with Eric sustained Edith, but her hope eventually dwindled. Over a year later, they and other prisoners were close to death when American soldiers liberated them. Recovery was a long road: Edith weighed only 70 pounds when she was rescued. Over 15,000 Jews from her hometown were deported; fewer than 100 returned and began rebuilding their lives. Eger focuses primarily on her teen years, with the exception of an epilogue detailing her return to Auschwitz nearly 40 years later, alongside her husband, Béla, whom she met when they both were sent to a TB hospital following the war. Eger’s present-tense stream-of-consciousness narrative allows readers to experience the brutality of the Nazis but also the cooperation and encouragement among the inmates and the events that gave her postwar life meaning.

A luminous memoir of human resilience. (author’s note)(Memoir. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews

★ “Eger pares down The Choice, her National Jewish Book Award–winner and New York Times best-selling combination Holocaust memoir and self-help book, into a sensitive, thought-provoking account for teens. . . . Impactful for all readers, especially history enthusiasts or fellow trauma survivors.

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