Auschwitz survivor escaped death because ‘Angel of Death’ Joseph Mengele liked her to dance for him
Captured by the Nazis when she was just 16, Edith was sent to the feared concentration camp along with the rest of her family
SHE had suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of Nazi sadists and lost her mother to executioners before she had even turned 17.
But Edith Eger lived to tell the tale of her harrowing time at the Auschwitz death camp.
Captured by the Nazis when she was just 16, Edith was sent to the feared concentration camp along with the rest of her family, reports.
The teenager, her father and her older sister, Magda, could only watch as Edith's 40-year-old mother was led away from them, deemed too old to work and therefore useless to her Nazi captors.
Edith was put to work alongside her fellow inmates, many of whom succumbed to starvation or were executed by the sadists running the infamous camp.
Still praying that her mother would one day return, Edith feared her own death every time she was led into the showers.
It was at Auschwitz, surrounded by unspeakable cruelty, where Edith came face to face with one of the most feared Nazi officers: Joseph Mengele.
Known as the Angel of Death, Dr Mengele was a torturer and sadist, who performed sick experiments on his Jewish victims in the name of science.
The SS officer's duties included choosing which prisoners would be executed, and which would end up dying on his operating table.
In one night, the monstrous doctor killed 14 sets of twins - while other procedures involved sewing Jewish children together, transfusing their blood or infecting them with diseases.
Mengele, who fled to South America after the war, spotted young Edith's talent for dancing at Auschwitz.
The sick SS officer ordered Edith to dance for him, and she saved herself by gracefully performing for the murderous Angel of Death when he ordered her to.
Edith's experience as a Jewish girl whose life was threatened by the Nazis is similar to that of tragic Anne Frank, the teenager who kept a diary while she was hiding from German troops.
But, unlike Anne Frank, Edith survived her nightmare ordeal - going on to write her own book, , about her life in the clutches of the Nazis.
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In 1941, with Nazism in the ascendancy, Edith was 13 years old, living with her family in Hungary.
She spent five hours a day in the ballet studio as evil spread across Europe, with her father eventually being sent to a labour camp for eight months in 1943.
But horror returned when Edith was 16, when soldiers came knocking at the family's door to tell them they were being relocated.
They were sent to Auschwitz, on the same terrifying journey into hell as millions of Jews across the continent.
In The Choice, Edith tells how she lived in fear and hunger in the death camp, where so many people were slaughtered by the evil regime.
She was then transferred again, to Mauthausen - a feared slave labour camp where Jewish prisoners were worked to their death.
Edith was eventually liberated from the camp, but not before she had seen the unspeakable horrors which took place there - including the sight of a young boy tied to a tree being used for target practice.
Refereed to as the 'the Anne Frank who didn't die', Edith went on to become a psychologist helping people with PTSD after the war was won by the Allies.
Meanwhile, Mengele fled Auschwitz before it was liberated, evading capture by moving to South America, where he drowned off the coast of Brazil in 1979.
The Choice, by Edith Eger is published by Rider & Co and is available for £14.99.
Previously, we told the incredible story of how 84 Germans escaped a Welsh WWII camp.
We also shared the amazing never-before-seen photos revealing how war-torn German cities were still trying to recover from the conflict a year after VE Day.