edited by Cara De Silva, with translations by Bianca Steiner Brown (110 pages. Jason Aronson. $25), is being published as a Holocaust document, of course, not as a guide to making strudels and tortes. Yet surely a guide was just what these women wanted to produce. Life in the kitchen–the skills they amassed, the flavors they knew so well, the passion for family that kept them stirring and kneading and tasting day after day–was much of what they owned, and the heart of what they had to give. By the time they scrawled these recipes, such dishes were dreams. But to write them down was to insist on a real-world future, to insist that their daughters would receive their inheritance. The manuscript they labeled simply Kochbuch was a powerful symbol of their resistance to annihilation.
The women of Terezin were not the only camp inmates who collected recipes for apple dumplings and asparagus salad even while they lived on potato peels. Talk of food went on endlessly in the camps, writes De Silva, a culinary historian, in the introduction to “In Memory’s Kitchen.” Her research turned up several other cookbooks, including one from Ravensbruck made up of children’s fantasy recipes. Malka Zimmer, a prisoner in Lenzing, couldn’t get hold of much paper, so she wrote on Reich leaflets, filling in the space around Hitler’s picture with recipes for spinach roulade and stuffed cabbage. “If we had had paper at Auschwitz, we would have written recipes down there, too,” survivor Sabina Margulies told De Silva. “We would have had a cookbook of thousands of pages.”
Mina Pachter was sent to Terezin in 1942, when she was 70 years old. Three years earlier Anny Stern had fled to Palestine, begging her mother to come with her. Pachter refused; she was sure that the They could see beyond the horror:. Women in Terezin at work (above), directions for making apple dumplings from the ‘Kochbuch’ Nazis would not harm the elderly. Her sharp-eyed poems about life in the barracks-the women quarreling over a few centimeters of space, the sisters whose love of cooking was “platonic,” for they had no food-are included in “In Memory’s Kitchen,” translated by her grandson David Stern. She died on Yom Kippur 1944.
Pachter’s chocolate cake is cooling on my kitchen counter as I write. She titled the recipe just that–“Pachter Torte”–so perhaps she was famous for it. Like most of the recipes, this one is written in such abbreviated fashion that few Americans today could cook from it. But the translator, Brown, herself a survivor of Terezin, has put some of them into usable form (she is a former editor at Gourmet). Her versions are not in the book, but she shared them with me. Mixing the butter and sugar in my own kitchen, adding the chocolate and then a bit of strong coffee and lemon peel, tasting the batter, were acts of remembrance. The women who re-created recipes in the face of death deserve to be honored for more than their deaths; their lives have a claim on us, too. Pachter Torte is dense and chocolatey, but it’s not sweet: you can taste the tang of the lemon. In that flavor, there is a monument to the women of Terezin, who saw beyond indescribable horror and sent the food of their hearts to nourish ours.
