In 1944, Edith Eva Eger and her family were sent to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp for Jews. Her parents were killed in the gas chambers. Eger remembers the day Dr. Josef Mengele pointed for her mother to go left. When Mengele pointed to the left, you went to the gas chamber, when he pointed to the right, you were allowed to live. As Eger's mother went to the left, she asked when she might see her mother next, and a friend pointed to the chimney of billowing fire and smoke. A year later, an American soldier found Eger because he noticed her hand moving among a number of dead bodies. In 1949, she moved to the United States, attended college and got a degree in psychology. Today, Eger shares her story with women cancer patients so they may learn how not to be a victim and to reconcile the issues of survivor guilt.

Eger of Turning Broken Bones into Dancing, stresses, that contrary to popular belief, there are no victims in this world. While you may not be able to control what happens to you, you can control how you respond. Some of the survival skills Eger shares with women diagnosed with cancer are: every problem is temporary, the quality of your decisions determines the quality of your life, dire conditions allow opportunities for inner growth, blame and condemnation seldom produce positive change and almost always make things worse, aggression and passivity are two of the least effective behaviors to effect a solution, forgiving is a selfish act to free yourself from being controlled, focus on seeing the world the way it could be - not the way it is, take responsibility for the responses you make, turn problems into challenges and crises into transitions, and while you may walk through the Valley of Death, you do not have to set up camp there.