The Choice

CHAPTER 17

Then Hitler Won

It isn’t the cold air coming through the cooling vent in my office that
makes me shiver. Soon I will be ĕy-three years old. I am no longer
the young orphaned mother Ęeeing war-torn Europe. I am no longer
the immigrant hiding from her past. I am Dr. Edith Eva Eger now. I
have survived. I have worked to heal. I use what I have learned from
my traumatic past to help others heal. I am oen called in by social
service organizations and medical and military groups to treat patients
with PTSD. I have come a great distance since escaping to America.
But I haven’t been back to Germany since the war.

*       *       *

at evening, to distract myself from my worry over how Jason is
handling the confrontation with his wife, to ease my own swirling
indecision, I call Marianne in San Diego and ask her what she thinks I
should do about Berchtesgaden. She is a mother now, and a
psychologist. We oen consult each other about our most challenging
patients. Just as for Jason in the long moments when he held the gun,
the decision before me now has a lot to do with my children—with the
kind of wound they will carry with them aer I’m gone: a healed one
or an open one.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Marianne says. “I want to tell you to go. You
survived, and now you get to go back and tell your story. at’s such a
triumph. But ... do you remember that Danish family, the friends of