Olga Lengyel

Olga Lengyel (19 October 1908 – 15 April 2001) was a Hungarian Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who later wrote about her experiences in her book Five Chimneys. She was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust.[1]

Life and career

Lengyel was a trained surgical assistant in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, working in the hospital where her husband, Dr Miklós Lengyel, was director. In 1944, she was deported with her husband, parents and two children to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp; she was the only member of her family to survive. She wrote about her experiences in a memoir, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz, first published in France in 1946 as Souvenirs de l'au-delà. (A later American paperback edition was entitled I Survived Hitler's Ovens; more recent editions have used the title Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz.[2])

In the memoir, Lengyel provides a chilling account of her encounter with Irma Grese, who mercilessly beat the most beautiful women in the camp, chose those who would be operated on by the SS doctor, and who would be sent to the gas chambers. She did so with great enthusiasm. She was quick to beat Lengyel, a Jew who had medical training and had been singled out to help the SS doctor. Ultimately, Lengyel was spared, but the chapter in which Grese is described ends on a chilling note. The survivor describes how she "saw Irma Greise [sic] coming from the Fuehrerstube, her whip in hand, to designate the next batch for the gas chamber". Her children died in the gas chamber.

I cannot acquit myself of the charge that I am, in part, responsible for the destruction of my own parents and of my two young sons. The world understands that I could not have known, but in my heart the terrible feeling persists that I could have, I might have, saved them.[2]

After the war, Lengyel emigrated to the United States where she founded the Memorial Library chartered by the University of the State of New York. "The Library, headquartered in her elegant residence, is Olga's legacy, carrying on her mission of actively educating future generations about the Holocaust, other genocides, and the importance of human rights."[1] She died of cancer in New York on 15 April 2001 at the age of 92.[3]

Legacy

In 2006, the Memorial Library began the Holocaust Educator Network, a national program for teachers committed to Holocaust education, especially in rural schools and small towns, in partnership with the National Writing Project's Rural Sites Network.[4]

See also

References
  1. "Olga Lengyel profile". Memorial Library.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  2. Olga Lengyel (1947). Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivors True Story of Auschwitz (2nd edition). Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. p. Chap. 1, pg. 11. ISBN 0-89733-376-4.
  3. Obituary: Olga Lengyel, nytimes.com, 18 April 2001.
  4. On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate, sunypress.edu; accessed 26 July 2015.
  • Profile, Thememoriallibrary.org; accessed 7 April 2018.
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