Five Chimneys

Five Chimneys, originally published in French as Souvenirs de l'au-delà (Memoirs from the Beyond), is the memoir of Olga Lengyel. She was born on October 19, 1909 in Transylvania (Part of Romania since 24 June 1920; when she born it was part of Hungary). Five Chimneys is similar to Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici, in the acute powers of observation and memory of the respective authors. However, whereas some of the events, especially those of a sexual nature, were over the head of the eleven-year-old narrator of Thanks to My Mother, Olga Lengyel describes such events with an unflinching gaze. The physical examination (oral, rectal, vaginal) given to the nude women arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while German soldiers chuckled suggestively, is just one example.

In 1944, Olga Lengyel was deported with her parents, husband and two children to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She eventually secured work in the infirmary at Auschwitz, a position which made her survival more likely. Olga survived Auschwitz, the only one of her family to do so. Her husband, Miklós Lengyel, died on the Death March. After the war, she immigrated to the United States via Odessa and France. Olga married Gustav Aguire and moved to Havana, but returned to New York City in 1962 and founded the Memorial Library in Manhattan. The mission of the Memorial Library is to support Holocaust education and to help teachers from across the United States promote an agenda for social justice. She died on April 15, 2001 in New York City at age 92.

In 1944, Olga Lengyel worked as a surgical assistant in Cluj (original name is Kolozsvár), the capital of Transylvania (Romania), at the clinic owned by her husband Miklós, a Berlin-educated surgeon. As early as 1943, the Lengyels had heard about German atrocities against civilians in occupied territories. However, they refused to believe what they considered “fantastic rumors”.