Download PDF Five Chimneys A Woman Survivor True Story of Auschwitz Audible Audio Edition Olga Lengyel Jennifer Wydra Chicago Review Press Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 8 hours and 10 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Chicago Review Press Audible.com Release Date January 8, 2019 Whispersync for Voice Ready Language English, English ASIN B07KRJQD55

Five Chimneys A Woman Survivor True Story of Auschwitz Audible Audio Edition Olga Lengyel Jennifer Wydra Chicago Review Press Books Reviews

• This is a scary and disturbing book. I am a middle aged woman, and have read my share of Holocaust books- and this one gave me nightmares. There's been a lot written about life in concentration and death camps, but what makes this book unique is that the author is not Jewish. She wasn't taken from her home or even forced to go- she went because her husband was sent. So she willingly went along, with her children and parents as well so the family could at least be together. The smiling authorities assured them of their safety. All would be well, they wouldn't be separated, the war would be over soon and everyone would go back to their happy lives. Of course that couldn't be further from the reality.... the author was the only survivor and her guilt is palpable. More than Ann Frank's diary, this is the book that should be given to high school students who would have a hard time understanding how normal, every day people were placed in almost unbelievable positions of master and slave. How many of us would have gone along with the Nazi regime, and followed orders? On the other hand, how many of us could survive the unspeakable conditions of the camps. The absolutely arbitrary chance of surviving is difficult to wrap your head around, there was no such thing as a predictable way to survive. And to survive and have your life but nothing else- no family, no home, nothing at all. Perhaps the most poignant moment was when the author finally found her way to the family home, the neighborhood she lived in with everything and everyone she knew gone forever. Unimaginable. Humanity at its absolute worst in this book, with very little in the way of redemption, yet highly readable and very critical that future generations never forget what happened and how easily it can happen again -and indeed, has.
• Wow, having trouble with words. I was born in 1967 and my knowledge of the haulicost was very limited. No one ever told me that Americans were interned and killed. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't really believe or at least understand the horrific medical experiments and sterilization that happened.
  Normally, I don't want to read about or think about gruesome stuff. But my dear friend's grandparents perished at Auchwitz and I finally found the courage to educate myself on this topic, out of respect for the Orlowski family from Poland, that were political prisoners and were murdered. My friend Jan Orlowski bore the emotional scars of what his father went through at Auchwitz.
  Everyone should read this and be grateful for whatever life we have. Deep lessons found in this book. It is not depressing, dear reader. Reading this book has given me greater strength to cope with my own difficulties. Really,compared to this sad reality in our history, how bad can your life really be? Ponder that while the long line at Walmart with only one cashier gets on your nerves. Or you bounce checks AGAIN and are scared of financial problems!!! This book will educate you in many ways and you will be a better person for having read it. Thank you, dear Author and publishers for getting this book to your grateful audience.
• If you only read one Holocaust memoir, read "Five Chimneys A Woman's Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz" by Olga Lengyel, the wife of a Transylvanian physician who ended up in the Nazis' most notorious death camp only because she could not believe, even as late as May of 1944, how treacherous they could be.
  
  She learned quickly -- starting with her first step on the platform of the train station at Cluj. Her husband, Dr. Miklos Lengyel, director of a 72-bed hospital and a Berlin-trained surgeon, had been detained and was to be deported to Germany. An S.S. officer graciously assured her that she was welcome to join him if she wished. She, their two sons, and her parents realized her mistake when the entire station was surrounded by armed sentries and they were forced with 90 others into a railcar designed to hold eight horses. It was the first, and perhaps the easiest, of the many lessons she would learn at the hands of the Nazis.
  
  Mrs. Lengyel's painfully poignant memoir -- "Mea culpa," she begins, "my fault, mea maxima culpa!" -- was published within two years of the end of World War II. It has been on my wishlist since I read that Albert Einstein praised it as the best Holocaust memoir. Indeed, he wrote her personally to thank her for her "very frank, very well written book. You have done a great service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak," he wrote.
  
  That, she tells us, is exactly why she wrote it. The few who survived carried a burden to tell the world what had happened there, to ensure the justice was served, and, more, to work to see that this should never happen again. It can be hard for us now to realize how successfully the Nazi regime concealed the atrocities that were carried out so blatantly behind the battle lines . . . even as it happens again and again elsewhere around the globe.
  
  "The Germans sinned grievously, but so did the rest of the nations, if only through refusing to believe and to toil day and night to save the wretched and the dispossessed by every possible means," she wrote.
  
  I have read many, many such memoirs, including in the current year those of two women who also survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of which I would recommend to anyone and one of which I would not recommend. Each woman has a different perspective. Mrs. Lengyel's is both as personal and intimate as either and more comprehensive. Hers is a story of deeply painful, personal tragedy, yet she also saw and observed what went on throughout the camps and ensured that she survived to record it that those who suffered it should not suffer in vain. Her account is detailed, and damning, and it includes lessons that cost more than anyone should ever be forced to pay.
  
  "Perhaps the greatest crime the 'supermen' committed against us was their campaign, often successful, to turn us into monstrous beasts ourselves," she writes in the final pages. Earlier chapters detail exactly how they did this, and how those of once unimpeachable integrity could be, and were, reduced to the lowest moral level. But that wasn't all she saw, or all she learned. She also wrote of those who resisted on every level. "Because of these few, I have not entirely lost my faith in mankind. If, even in the jungle of Birkenau, all were not necessarily inhuman to their fellow men, then there is hope indeed. It is that hope which keeps me alive."
  
  That faith is one of the reasons her memoir is indispensable. If she, who witnessed and suffered all of this, could hold on to hope for us, we can't be entirely lost. Yet.