Audiobook Sample of The Choice by Edith Eger
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Chapter three. Dancing in hell. All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside. My ballet master had told me I never understood what he meant until outfits. Magda stares at a chimney on top of the building and mother entered the soul never dies. She says my sister finds words of comfort, but I am in shock. I am numb. I can't think about the incomprehensible things that are happening, that have already happened. I can't picture my mother consumed by flames. I can't fully grasp that she is gone. And I can't ask why I can't even grieve. Not now it will take all of my attention to survive. The next minute, the next breath I will survive. If my sister is there, I will survive by touching myself to her as though I am her shadow. We are herded through the silent yet echoing showers. We are robbed of our hair. We stand outside shorn and naked, waiting for our uniforms. Taunts from the capos and ss officers swarm us like arrows grazing a bare wet skin worse than their words or their eyes. I'm sure the disgust with which they glare at us. Could tear my skin, split my ribs. Their hate is both possessive and dismissive and it makes me ill once I thought that Eric would be the first man to see me naked. Now. He will never see my flesh and scarred by their hatred. Have they already made me something less than human? Will I ever resemble the girl? I was, I will never forget your eyes, your hands. I have to keep myself together. If not from myself than for Eric. I turn to my sister who has fallen into her own shocked silence who has managed in each chaotic dash from place to place in every crowded line. Not to leave my sight. She shivers as the sun falls. She holds in her hands, her shorn locks, thick strands of a ruined hair. We have been standing naked for hours and she grips her hair as though in holding it. She can hold on to herself, her humanity. She is so near that we are almost touching and yet I long for her magda, the confident sexy girl with all the jokes. Where is she? She seems to be asking the same question. She searches for herself in her ragged clumps of hair. The contradictions in this place, unnerve me murder. We've just learned is efficient here. Systematic, but there seems to be no system in place for distributing the uniforms for which we've been waiting most of the day. The guards are cruel and rigid yet it seems that no one is in charge the scrutiny they give our bodies doesn't signal a value. It signifies only the degree to which we have been forgotten by the world. Nothing makes sense. But this too, the interminable waiting, the complete absence of reason must be part of the design. How can I keep myself steady in a place where the only steadiness is in fences, in death, in humiliation, in the steadily churning smoke. Magda finally speaks to me. How do I look? She asks, tell me the truth, the truth. She looks like a mangy dog, a naked stranger. I can't tell her this of course, but any lie would hurt too much. And so I must find an impossible answer. A truth that doesn't want I gaze into the fierce blue of her eyes and think that even for her to ask the question, how do I look? It's the bravest thing I've ever heard. There aren't mirrors here. She's asking me to help her find and face herself. And so I tell her the one true thing. That's mine to say your eyes. I tell my sister they're so beautiful. I never noticed them when they were covered up by all that hair. It's the first time I see that we have a choice to pay attention to what we've lost or to pay attention to what we still have. Thank you. She whispers