The Choice by Edith Eva Eger

The author was a young teenager in Hungary when WWII began. It has been said that the best chance of survival for a European Jew in Nazi occupied Europe lived in Hungary--the extermination came later there than to other countries, but the best chance wasn't very good. The front end of this memoir is a first hand account of what it was like to be there. She and her sister, who had been rivals before being interned at Auschwitz, clung to each other after Mengele personally evaluated them on arrival and sent their mother to the gas chamber and allowed them to live. The second half of the book is about her PTSD and how she struggled over the years to cope with it, sometimes well and often times not very well at all. She ended up, well into middle age, deciding to train as a therapist and to help others claw their way to better mental health, to overcome the immeasurable trauma that they had experienced and live fuller lives. She published this when she was in her 90's and she is still alive at 97--one of the oldest Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany.