The Ballerina of Auschwitz: Young Adult Edition of The Choice

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.