Cara De Silva (–2022)

I read the Foreword and Introduction. I learned that Theresienstadt (Terezin in German) an18th Century garrison town in Bohemia (and Moravia) became a Jewish camp on November 24, 1941 becoming a German protectorate.

A transit camp initialing holding Czech Jews, then elderly German and Austrian Jews, and later Dutch and Danish Jews.A crematorium was built because the camp's death rate was high due to starvation and disease

Prominent Jews often sent here to a 'model ghetto' to deflect negative publicity. Because the prisoners were highly educated, creative and talented the nazis permitted a variety of cultural events. There was a lending library with thousands of books, Rabbi Leo Baeck (popular German rabbi) taught philosophy and theology; lectures, concerts and drama performances organized. Children were educated in athletics and arts for as long as possible because they were the future but... they fared the worst.

Prioritizing food for those who held the most physical work, left little for the elderly. Everyone was hungry; thought, dreamt of and talked about food all the time. Men, but mostly women put together 'cook books' of dishes they lovingly cherished. Mina Pachter was one of these women, a loving mother and grandmother, who passed along her 'cook book' to a friend in Therienstadt hoping it would reach her daughter. Many, many years later it does.… (más)

This is a beautiful compilation of recipes that carried women through the most horrible of conditions, that gave them hope, hope that someday their memories would be their reality again. It's ever so much more than recipes though, there's commentary from family and the director of the US Holocaust Research Institute, there are witty poems...and there are omissions, an egg left out or a whole step, which lend poignancy, a reminder of the conditions these recipes were recorded under. It's a beautiful book. I imagine that most of the recipes could even be reproduced once you convert the measurements. There are one or two that I will be searching for similar directions to!… (más)

This book is a memoir told in recipes. I know that nothing I say here will do this book justice. This quote from the book's foreward by Dorothy Wagner explains:

"Their thoughts were inevitably and ceaselessly focused on food. Discussion of its preparation and the heated arguments concerning the superiority of one method over another served as more than an anodyne for their tortured nerves. It strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid, not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to."

In such an unimaginable horrific time, these women dared to think beyond their prison, risked death and torture to give their family and their heritage a way to live on. Such a story of hope and strength amidst a torturous way of life. It made me think of my mother, and made the book all the more emotional because of this raw look at a precious gift from a mother to a daughter.… (más)