Touring to Jonava: THE CHOICE

The performance is part of the 2026 programme of the contemporary theatre festival “DEK”. “Memories are often just fragments, brief moments or touches that together make up the collage of life. <…> Memory is untouchable ground. But it is full of ghosts.” (Edith Eger, *The Choice*)

During the Second World War, Edita Eger and her mother, father, sister and other Jewish families were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. A ballet dancer and gymnast, she danced for Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. The belief that everything happening was temporary, and that soon she would see her beloved and her parents, helped Edita find the strength to endure not only unimaginable horror, cruelty, humiliation, dehumanisation, exhausting labour, hunger, illness and the Death March, but also life afterwards: “When we were liberated, I was so weak that I couldn’t even speak or move; I was lying in a pile of corpses. We were free, but we didn’t know what to do with our freedom.” Both of Edita’s parents died in the gas chamber. Her boyfriend was murdered a day before liberation. It took Edita many years to learn to forgive—not only others, but herself as well. Drawing on her unique experience, she invites all who are suffering to face their trauma and choose the freedom to break free from it: “You cannot change what happened, what you did, or what was done to you. But you can choose to live now.”

Inspired by Edita Eger’s book *The Choice*, the performance uses movement, dance, fragments of memories and puppets to tell the story of a woman who witnessed unimaginable human cruelty, kept her memories hidden within herself for many years, and eventually understood that true freedom—true release from prison—would come when she dared to return to the place from which many never came back… This is the story of all of us: people who have endured terrible experiences, people unable to let go of the ghosts of the past, people suffering in prisons of their own thoughts.

“This material chose me… When I read *The Choice*, I thought it was such a shocking, inspiring, transformative book… but could it be brought to the puppet theatre stage? I kept pushing it away and looking for something else, but this book wouldn’t let go… and I let it in. I continue my journey through duality. I search for the transformation of the living and the dead. Movement, figure and human being… On stage, fragments of people, shells and memories of past lives fly around—memories that are only ‘fragments, brief moments or touches that together make up the collage of life’. We live among them constantly. They envelop us, get in our way, and sometimes push us forward. I think it is important to meet our ghosts, look them in the eye and let them go. To choose life, light,” says the performance’s director, Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė.