[ “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” was organized by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation. More than one survivor
remembers sustaining fellow-prisoners with vivid descriptions of the
foods they’d eaten in their earlier lives. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RECIPES FROM THE SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ  
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Hannah Goldfield
October 22, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” was organized by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation. More than one survivor
remembers sustaining fellow-prisoners with vivid descriptions of the
foods they’d eaten in their earlier lives. _

Survivors of the Holocaust meet up to launch a cookbook—recipes for
matzo-ball soup, kogel mogel, and Marion Wiesel’s onionless latkes,
favored by her husband, Elie., Illustration by João Fazenda

 

“As far as matzo-ball soup, my mother made the best,” Ronald
Lauder said the other night on the Upper East Side, in the bookshop of
the Neue Galerie, the art museum he founded. Lauder, seventy-eight,
the younger son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, and a billionaire heir to
their cosmetics fortune, was there to celebrate the publication of a
cookbook. “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” was organized by the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, of which he is the chairman.

In the shop, before the book’s launch, Lauder sat with a handful of
its contributors. How did the idea originate? “When you’re dealing
with survivors, when you’re dealing with Jews, everyone has a
different version of events,” he said. “But there’s only one
version that’s correct, and that’s mine.” In January of 2020,
Lauder had invited a hundred and twenty survivors to visit
Auschwitz-Birkenau on the seventy-fifth anniversary of its liberation.
At dinner one night, talk turned to gefilte fish. The group stayed in
touch. Maria Zalewska, the foundation’s Polish-born director, began
to gather recipes.

More than one survivor remembers sustaining fellow-prisoners with
vivid descriptions of the foods they’d eaten in their earlier lives.
Tova Friedman (kasha varnishkes, carrot tzimmes), a sprightly
eighty-four- year-old with a silvery-blond bob, was "ve and a half
when she was sent to Auschwitz. “Food is home,” she said. “And
if you talk about it the smell comes to you and home comes back.”

Eugene Ginter, eighty-three, who was liberated just before he turned
six, had a more complicated relationship with smells. “When I came
in Auschwitz,” he recalled, “I looked through the wooden slats of
the cattle car, and I said, ‘It’s very pretty,’ because it had
trees. But then the smell, it was a sweet smell. It was the human
bodies being burned.” Ginter’s contributions to the book are the
foods his mother made after the war, to fatten his emaciated frame:
dark chocolate shaved over buttered black bread; a boiled potato
mashed with buttermilk; kogel mogel, whipped egg whites beaten with
yolks and sugar.

Across the hall, in Café Sabarsky, servers circulated with trays of
champagne and bite-size versions of some of the book’s recipes:
Elisabeth Citrom’s eggplant salad with crispy rye croutons; David
Marks’s rakott krumpli, Hungarian layered potatoes with cheese;
Goldie Finkelstein’s rugelach. Sitting on a banquette, Lois
Flamholz, ninety-four, a survivor who was born in Czechoslovakia,
looked at a photograph of herself in the book in which she presses
circles of dough together for jelly cookies. “I miss those
cookies!” she cried. “I can’t stand,” she explained. “I
stopped cooking, I stopped baking.”

 On another banquette, the actor and director Joel Grey recounted, to
the producer Jeffrey Seller, his experience filming “Cabaret” in
Germany, in 1971. “I was terrified on the flight,” he said. “I
stepped off the airplane, stood on the ground, and wept.”

Lauder moved to a lectern. “The "first title of the book was
‘Auschwitz Recipes,’ ” he said. “It didn’t go too far.”
Midway through his thank- yous, he turned toward the door. “Before I
say anything else, a very special woman is coming in now, Marion
Wiesel.” He went on, “It was Marion who I called to get the recipe
from her husband, Elie.

   

  And, today, the latkes that you ate were from Elie’s recipe.”

The latke recipe was, unusually, absent onions. Later, a pushy
interlocutor asked Mrs. Wiesel, ninety-one, a survivor herself, and a
gifted translator, if it was true that her late husband didn’t care
for them. She said, “I can’t believe you’re interested in
whether or not he liked onions.” Elisha, the Wiesels’ son, said,
“My father preferred to focus on the positive. So rather than an
onion-hater, I would think of him as a chocolate-lover.” According
to family lore, Marion had ensnared Elie with her latkes, and also
bribed him into quitting smoking by promising him a Jaguar. “There
was no Jaguar,” Elisha said.

In the lobby, on the way out, Tova Friedman, whose TikTok account,
TovaTok, has nearly half a million followers, held court. Thanks to
her new memoir, “The Daughter of Auschwitz,” she’s been invited
around the world to tell her story. “So they took us to this . . .
high tea,” she said, describing a visit to London. “We got that
thing, full of little sandwiches. So I said, ‘What happened to the
crust? That’s the best part of the bread!’ ” She went on, “You
eat your soggy white bread, I got an idea. I’m gonna invent chai
tea,” as in the Hebrew word for life, pronounced gutturally.
“It’s gonna be rye toast, with crusts, and it’s gonna be lox.
It’s gonna be gefilte fish.” ♦

* Gefilte fish
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* cookbook
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