On the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Aus chwitz, the legacy of the Nazi death camp contin ues to haunt the survivors and their children.
My mother, Olga Sternberg, whom
we called Anyu, spent close to two years
in that hell. Growing up, I don’t recall
a single Shabbat meal when Auschwitz
didn’t crowd its way into the table conversation.
“Eat your food – we were starved and
had little to eat in Auschwitz!”
I was born in Hungary five years after
the end of World War II. One day when
I was about eight years old, I came home
from playing soccer with one of the Hungarian boys.
I told my mother that the
boy me called me a “dirty Jew” and asked
her what did that mean? My quiet and
dignified mother instructed me to hit
him in the face the next time he said that.
Some time after, the boy had occasion
to call me a dirty Jew again. I did as my
mother instructed and slugged him. As I
got older and heard my mother’s stories
about Auschwitz, I began to understand
why my gentle mother told me never to
allow anyone to call me a dirty Jew.
MY MOTHER grew up in a picturesque
town in southern Hungary called Dombóvár.
She studied Latin and Greek in
university and attended plays and poetry
readings with friends. But her privileged life would change.
On the brink of
the Second World War, Hungary joined
forces with Hitler and became an ally
of Nazi Germany. Shortly after, anti-Semitic
discriminatory laws were enacted, aimed to isolate and dehumanize
the Jews. They were expelled from jobs,
occupations and from universities. My
mother and grandfather and the other
Jews of Dombóvár, were kicked out of
their homes and forced into designated ghettos.
Naturally, after moving out,
Hungarian gentiles swiftly moved in
and looted the possessions left behind.
About 1,100 Jews were moved into 20
houses constituting the Jewish ghetto
of Dombóvár.
Soon after, they were rounded up and
shoved into cattle cars to be deported.
For six miserable days and nights,
without food or water, and no clue
what awaited them, over 100 Jews were
cramped into a wagon large enough for
six cows. Close to 50 such wagons were
in this transport.
When my mother arrived, she had
the “pleasure” to meet the infamous
Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death.”
Mengele would often wait for the new
transports to select guinea pigs for his
horrific and meaningless human experiments.
He also selected those he
thought fit for labor battalions, while
those he deemed unfit he sent to the gas
chambers and the crematoria.
My mother was lucky. She was select
ed for work. Her father was not. He was
older and of no use to the Third Reich.
He was gassed. So were my father’s wife
and their little boy, as well as the rest of
his family.
After the selection, men and wom-
en were separated. Anyu recalled many
times, in her soft and gentle voice, about
being stripped naked and paraded before
a group of jeering, mocking and laugh-
ing German guards. Many were drunk.
Naked, she was subjected to addition-
al search, looking for smuggled items
such as diamonds. Then came the show-
er. Fortunately for her, water came out
of the showerheads and not the infa-
mous Zyklon B poison gas the Germans
used to murder millions of other Jews.
After emerging from the showers, the
hair from her head and body was shaved
off and she was “deloused” with a dis-
infectant spray. She was given rags and
broken shoes and assigned to one of the
many barracks in the Birkenau part of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
ANYU DESCRIBED her arrival in Aus-
chwitz many times. She recalled the
screaming of the passengers as they
were beaten to disembark; the terror
and the panic. She described the sick-
ening sweet smell permeating the air
that she would later learn was the smell
of burning bodies emanating from the
constantly belching smoke stacks of the
crematoria.
More than the starvation, the beat-
ings, the freezing cold or the harsh
labor, it was the humiliation of her na-
kedness at her arrival that was the most
dehumanizing and unbearable for her.
I became emotional each time she told
me her story.
Separated from her father she was
completely alone. Several women from
the Hungarian town of Pápa befriended
her. They shared their bread, a scarce
commodity, and they shared their fate.
They were all assigned to work in the Ar-
gus airplane-manufacturing factory.
She told us often of the brutality that
was life in Auschwitz. The frequent “se-
lections” of the – now – sick and useless
prisoners for the gas chambers; the ever
constant “Zell-appells,” roll calls, standing
at attention for hours in the freezing cold.
But strangely, she found a silver lining
in her situation. She said she was lucky
to be assigned to wash the airplane
parts. She worked a machine with warm
water that she would lean up against to
keep from freezing.
How did this soft-spoken, refined lady
manage to survive almost two years at
Auschwitz, I often wondered.
“What did you do to survive Aus-
chwitz?” I would ask her. “How did you
do it?”
“I cooked all day long with the other
women,” she would reply.
“Cooked?” I asked, surprised. “But
you told me that you were starved and
always hungry.”
“Well,” she answered, “we cooked ver-
bally. We traded recipes. Each one of us
would describe our favorite dishes while
the others listened.”
After almost two years “cooking” in
Auschwitz, Anyu had memorized count-
less recipes that stayed with her forever.
WITH THE war over, Anyu and the ladies
were liberated. Hitchhiking through
war-torn Europe, they finally made
their way back to Hungary. Most of their
relatives and friends had perished.
Two years after liberation, Anyu was
invited to visit Pápa to spend some time
with the ladies from Auschwitz. They
introduced her to my father, who was
also alone. Shortly after, my parents
were married and started a new family.
Their stories of suffering have left a
deep legacy within me. The sight of
wasted food reminds me of my parents’
years in Auschwitz. Pictures of Jews in
Auschwitz invariably have me search-
ing for my parents’ faces. A lifetime
of holidays spent without any uncles,
aunts or cousins or grandparents. And
of course, I often think of my precious
four-year-old older brother. Auschwitz
robbed me of my family and left me a
deep and painful history instead.
Memorable events become “time
markers.” The world counts 2016 years
since the birth of Jesus. When my par-
ents recalled a specific event, they in-
evitably would date it, as “that was two
years before Auschwitz” or “three years
after the camps.”
Anyu is gone now. She died at the age
of 93. I think of Anyu and Auschwitz
whenever I cook. She not only left me
her stories as a legacy: She also left me
her recipes.
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