THE BALLERINA OF AUSCHWITZ

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.