Women of Auschwitz
BOOKS BY WOMEN WHO WERE IN AUSCHWITZ OR BOOKS ABOUT INDIVIDUAL WOMEN WHO WERE IN AUSCHWITZ:
All images of Seweryna Maria Szmaglewska who published the first, non-fiction memoir about being a long-term prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Raya Kagan (left, 1937) and Raya Kagan (centre, 1961) as a witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem.
Lidia Maksymowicz (blue jacket) was three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, a member of the partisan resistance from Belarus. Picked out by Dr Josef Mengele for his sadistic experiments, she was sent to the children’s block and endured eighteen months of hell. When the camp was liberated, her mother was gone, presumed dead. Lidia, traumatized, was adopted by a Polish woman. In 1962, she discovered that her birth parents were still alive in the USSR.
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It must be noted that in December of 1942, the journalist Natalia Zarembina (1895-1973), in occupied Warsaw, published anonymously what is often cited as the first book about Auschwitz, Obóz śmierci, based mainly on reports from three former inmates: Eryk Lipinski, Henryk Swiatkowski and Edward Bugajski. The following year it was published from London as Auschwitz: The Camp of Death and soon appeared in six other languages. It was published from New York as of March, 1944, under the imprint Poland Fights, as a 48-page stapled booklet, with a one-page facsimile of the cover of the 1942 Polish first edition that was published by the Polish underground. A full-page map shows locations of major concentration camps in Poland. It describes Camp Districts, Temporary Concentration Camps, General Concentration Camps, Forced Labor Camps, Concentration Camps for Clergy, Concentration Camps for Women, Concentration Camps for Jews, Camps for “Improvement of the Race” (where “the only duty that is absolutely enforced [of the young defect-free Polish and German inmates] is the regular performance of sexual intercourse with the partner assigned”), Camps for “Correction of Youth” and Concentration Camps for Children known as “Educational Institutes. Although not herself a prisoner, Zarembina was active in the Polish Socialist Party and the “Zegota” Council for Aid to Jews. She fled Poland in 1946 but returned in the late 1960s and died in Warsaw.
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1945 — Szmaglewska, Seweryna Maria, Smoke over Birkenau / Dymy nad Birkenau (Warsaw) (Czytelnik Publishing House 1945); also translated into English by Jadwiga Rynas in 1947 for H. Holt of New York. Seweryna Maria Szmaglewska-Wiśniewska was born on February 11, 1916 and died on July 7, 1992. She was a prisoner in Auschwitz from 1942 to January of 1945 when she escaped from the Nazis during a death march to Gross-Rosen. In her original foreword, written in 1945 prior to publication, Szmaglewska estimated five million poeple had been murdered at Auschwitz (primarily Birkenau), including three million Jews. The International War Tribunal in Nuremberg included the text of Smoke over Birkenau in the papers for prosecution and she was invited to testify. Her book has been reprinted twenty times in Poland. It is now considered to be the first eye-witness account of Auschwitz-Birkenau to be published. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum re-issued the book in English in 2001, using the translation from Polish that was done by Jadwiga Rynas. Prior to imprisonment in Auschwitz, she has spent two months in the prisons of Piotrków and Czestochow. She was one of only two Poles to testify at the Nuremberg Trials on February 27, 1946 (along with Samuel Rajzman). She married a fellow Auschwitz survivor and became a successful author in Poland.
1946 — Tedeschi, Giuliana: Questo povero corpo (Milan: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1946). This book was translated as There is a Place on Earth – A Woman in Auschwitz (expanded and translated by Tim Parks in 1992 for Pantheon Books of New York); also, Yesh makom al pnei ha-adamah (Yad Vashem: 2000)
1947 — Lengyel, Olga: Five Chimneys (Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1947; reissued by Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995). A physician’s assistant, Lengyel was a Hungarian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Hers is easily one of the best memoirs of Auschwitz in the same league as books by long-time survivors Vrba, Muller, Nyiszli and Venezia. [Primo Levi spent eleven months in Monowitz/Buna until its liberation; at age 15, Elie Wiesel arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944 and was there for three weeks before he and his father were transferred to Monowitz/Buna, then onto Buchenwald where he was liberated on April 11, 1945. Their books tended to be more ‘literary.’]
1947 — Millu, Liana: Il fumo di Birkenau. 1947. [See info below / Yes, this title matches the title used in Polish by Seweryna Szmaglewska in 1945.]
1947 — Kagan, Raya, Hell’s Office Women: Oswiecim Chronicle (Merhavyah, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1947) aka Women in the Halls of Hell by Ra’ya Kagan (Sifriyat Haoalim). It became Women in the Office of Hell, edited and prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Fabienne Bergmann, published by the Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees of France and the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, Paris 2020.
1948 — Lingens-Reiner, Ella: Prisoners Of Fear (Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1948)
[Schwalbova, Manci.: Eyes Extinguished / Vyhasmute oci (Bratislava – year unknown). Sent to Auschwitz on the second transport from Slovakia, she reportedly saved lives with her medical skills.]
1951 — Zywulska, K.: I Survived Auschwitz / Prezila jsem Osvetim (Warsaw); English version is I Came Back (1951) translated by Dennis Dobson
1965 — Delbo, Charlotte, Auschwitz and After, is the English title for a trilogy, first published in French, in three installments, and all written in French, soon after the war’s end. The Anglicized titles are “None of Us Will Return” (1965), “Useless Knowledge” (1970) and “The Measure of Our Days” (1971). The first volume, Le convoi du 24 janvier, from France, was also published in Geneva, Switzerland as Aucun de Nous ne Reviendra (None of Will Return) in 1965 by Editions Gonthier and republished in English as Convoy to Auschwitz. Delbo’s work was re-translated by Rosette Lamont for Yale University Press in 2014.
1967 — Birenbaum, Halinam, Hope is the last to die (Nadzieja umiera ostatnia), 1967. Translated to Spanish by Xavier Parre (Muzeum Auschwith-Birkenau, Poland 2015). Translated by David Welsh (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2016)
1968 — Christine Klusacek, Die Österreichische Freiheitsbewegung. Gruppe Roman Karl Scholz (Europa Verlag, Wien, 1968) / or, according to Hermann Langbein: Christiane Klusacek, Österreichische Wissenschaftler und Kunstler unter dem NS Regime (Austrian scholars and artists under the Nazi regime)
1976 — Fénelon, Fania: Sursis pour l’orchestre (1976) / Playing for Time (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997)
1985 — Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara: Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land translated by Roslyn Hirsch (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Caroline Press, 1985)
1986 — Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara, Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land (University of North Carolina Press, 1986) Edited by Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch. Translated by Roslyn Hirsch
1991 — Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Cohn Dekel, Sheila: Children of the Flames (William Morrow and Company Inc., 1991)
1996 — Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita: Inherit the Truth, 1939-1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 1996)
1996 — Gelissen, Rena Kornreich (with Heather Dune Macadam), Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz (Beacon Press, 1996)
2005 — Cernyak-Spatz, Susan, Protective Custody Prisoner 34042 (privately printed, N&S Publishers, 2005; published in a German translation by Metropol Verlag, 2008). A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ravensbruck, professor emerita of German at the University of North Carolina.
2009 — Kor, Eva Mozes: I Survived the Angel of Death (Tanglewood Publishing, 2009)
2010 — Serejski, Marian Henryk, I Am Healthy and I Feel Fine: The Auschwitz Letters of Marian Henryk Serejski (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2010)
2017 — Eger, Dr. Edith Eva: The Choice: Embrace the Impossible (Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, 2017)
2019 — Perl, Gisela: I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz (Lexington Books, 2019)
2020 — Leibovitz, Sara and Elboim, Eti: One Girl In Auschwitz (eBookPro Publishing, 2020)
2021 — Byczkowska-Nowak, Marta: What path to freedom? The story of the first woman to escape from Auschwitz (2021) [about Jenina Nowak]
2021 — Midwood, Ellie: The Girl Who Escaped From Auschwitz (Grand Central Publishing, 2021)
2013 — Niwinska, Helena Dunicz: One of the Girls in the Band: The Memoirs of a Violinist in Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2013.
2020 — MacAdam, Heather Dune: 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz (Citadel / Kensington Books, 2020)
2022 — Hellinger, Magda (with Maya Lee, and David Brewster), The Nazis Knew My Name: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Courage in Auschwitz (Atria, 2022)
2023 — Maksymowicz, Lidia, (with Paolo Luigi Rodari), The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry
Ebert, Lily, Lily’s Promise
Eger, Edith, The Choice
Born in 1984, Marta Byczkowska-Nowak (right) is a graduate of the Faculty of Polish Philology at the University of Łódź.
List compiled for this site by Alan Twigg and Michelle Madden; suggestions for additions welcome.
Also:
Born near Paris in 1913, Charlotte Delbo (above) was active in the French Young Communist Women’s League and left the safety of Buenos Aires to become active in the French Resistance until she was captured in Paris and sent to Auschwitz in early 1943 on an unusual convoy known as Convoi des 3100 for non-Jewish women. She was one of the forty-nine survivors of the Auschwitz camp out of the two hundred and thirty “political” women deportees on that convoy of January 24, 1943. She also survived in Ravensbrück, the Nazi camp for women. After the war, she worked at the UN in Geneva, then at the CNRS in Paris. She wrote about her experiences in Le convoi du 24 janvier, republished in English as Convoy to Auschwitz (1998). Her major work was a trilogy collectively called Auschwitz and After, published in three installments, 1965, 1970 and 1971. It was translated by Rosette Lamont for Yale University Press in 2014. She died in 1985. In Paris, Bibliotheque Charlotte Delbo is named in her honour.
Born in Pisa in 1914, Liana Millu (Millul) developed her early penchant for writing and journalism by contributing to the Leghorn-based Il Telegrafo, subsequently obtaining her Master’s degree and becoming a school teacher, only to be fired due to Italy’s new anti-Jewish racial laws. She moved to Genoa and joined the clandestine partisan group “Otto” until she was reported to the authorities by an informer and arrested in Venice on March 7, 1944. From the prison camp at Fossoli camp she was deported to Auschwitz, from which was transferred to Ravensbrück. Immediately after the liberation, Liana started writing her first book in pencil and reportedly gave the stub of her pencil to Primo Levi–a metaphorical passing of the literary baton. In 1947, she published Il fumo di Birkenau / Smoke Over Birkenau, one of the first memoirs to describe the experiences of women in the camps. Primo Levi later wrote the introduction to a 1971 edition. An English version of Smoke over Birkenau (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991) was translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a novelist, and it received the 1991 PEN Renato Poggioli translation prize in 1994. [Hers is a different book from the 1945 account by Szmaglewska with the same title.] Having established herself as a respected novelist in Italy, she died in Genoa in 2005.
Magda Hellinger, pictured here in Jiříkov, Czechoslovakia, approximately 1948, provided video testimonies to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre; and the Shoah Foundation. In 2002, at age 86, she began writing and rewriting her story by hand, and self-published a memoir. At age 89, she died in 2006. Her daughter Maya Lee added to that memoir, after doing more research, aided by her co-writer David Brewster. Her stories concentrate on how she tried to help other prisoners in her supervisory roles as a camp Stubenältesten (room leader), Blockältesten (block leader) and Lagerältesten (camp leader). She also writes about her strange friendship with the most notorious and feared female SS guard Irma Grese, the so-called “Hyena of Auschwitz,” for whom she became the equivalent of a confidante or older sister. While at Auschwitiz, they communicated on an almost daily basis. Hellinger claims used her influence to improve the lives of her fellow prisoners as much as she could dare to do so.
Helena (or Halinam) Birenbaum
- Hope is the last to die (Nadzieja umiera ostatnia), 1967. Translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Hebrew
- Return to ancestors’ land (Powrót do ziemi praojców), 1991
- Scream for remembrance (Wołanie o pamięć),1999
- Far and near echoes. Meetings with young people(Echa dalekie i bliskie. Spotkania z młodzieżą), 2001
- Life is dear to everyone (Życie każdemu drogie), 2005
- My life began from the end. Collected Poems Of A Holocaust Survivor. (Moje życie zaczęło się od końca. Wiersze Zebrane Poetki Ocalałej Z Zagłady), 2010
- They still ask (Wciąż pytają) 2011
- I am looking for life in the dead, Interview with Halina Birenbaum (Szukam życia u umarłych, Wywiad z Haliną Birenbaum, 2013
- It’s not the rain, it’s people (To nie deszcz, to ludzie. Halina Birenbaum w rozmowie z Moniką Tutak-Goll, Wydawnictwo Agora, Warszawa 2019, 2019
- From history of my life after The Shoah. Memories. (Z historii mojego życia po Zagładzie. Wspomnienia. Wydawnictwo Anna Maria Mickiewicz Literary Waves Publishing, London 2022 , 2022
All text by Alan Twigg.
THIS IS HOLDING TEXT ONLY, FROM WIKIPEDIA – ENTRY TO BE UPDATED
Ella Lingens-Reiner, M.D. (18 November 1908 – 30 December 2002) was an Austrian physician and is one of the Righteous Among Nations honored by Yad Vashem. She and her husband Kurt Lingens M.D., with Baron Karl von Motesiczky, harbored multiple Jews in their home during the Second World War. She was sent to Auschwitz by the Gestapo in 1942 and then later was imprisoned at Dachau.[1] She survived the war and became president of the organization of former Auschwitz prisoners, Österreichische Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz… On February 15, 1943, Ella was sent to the women’s camp at the Birkenau-Auschwitz concentration camp.[4] She was given the number 36,088. Almost immediately after her imprisonment, Ella became an essential part of the camp organization as a doctor in the camp hospital…. She published a memoir of her time imprisoned, titled Prisoners of Fear, in 1948, which described many of the horrors of the camps and the small moments of humanity she found there.[5] In early March 1964, Ella testified as a witness during the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.[9] She served for many years as president of the organization of former Auschwitz prisoners (Osterreichische Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz).[2] Yad Vashem honored Ella Lingens-Reiner and Kurt Lingens with the Medal of Honor Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem in 1980.[1] Ella Lingens-Reiner died on December 30, 2002, in Vienna.
Other volumes to be considered:
Repackaged version (above)
Repackaged version (above)
EVA PUSZTAI-FAHIDI [See Chapter 11, The Final Verdict, by Tobias Buck (2024) — A secular Hungarian Jew, she died in 2023. Arrived at Auschwitz via cattle car with family members on July 1, 1944, at age 18; all other family members were killed except for one aunt who committed suicide soon after the war. “She could not live with her memories.” Eva was selected for factory work and sent to a munitions camp in Allendorf, near Frankfurt, a subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, with 999 other Hungarian women had not gone up the chimneys. She told Tobias Buck that an SS man once said, “Above me is only God.”
Éva Fahidi was just 18 when she and her family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Her mother and her 11-year-old sister died the same day in the gas chamber, her father died from the harsh working conditions. Just before the liberation of Auschwitz Éva managed to escape a death march. She returned to Hungary in 1945 but remained silent about what she had seen in Auschwitz for nearly 60 years. In 2003, she returned to the site of the death camp and prompted by this experience she decided to write about her own story in a book. Ten years later choreographer Réka Szabó, head of Tünet Dance Company, asked her whether they could jointly make a special dance theatre production about her life. 90-year-old Éva had never set foot on stage yet despite this she agreed to create the piece together with Emese Cuhorka, 60 years her junior, in just three months. In the meantime, Réka Szabó not only directs the rehearsals but also uses cameras to document the meeting of the two women and the birth of the performance entitled Sóvirág (Sea Lavendar).
What makes it so special?
How can one talk about a trauma indescribable in words? This is the greatest dilemma facing fictional and documentary works on the Holocaust and Réka Szabó’s film attempts to find an answer to this question. The Euphoria of Being is an unusual experiment since it is both documentary and werkfilm in one, the players speak both to the camera and each other at the same time. Earlier, Éva Fahidi had spoken at length about what she experienced in those weeks and months, but the stage appearance required a different type of dramatization. We are witnesses to how the three women mutually decide what it is possible to take from the stories and memories of Éva and how to convey them in the language of movement and dance with the help of improvizational dance exercises and performances suitable for a psycho-drama.
Although the viewer knows from the opening sequences that the performance was eventually finished, the deadline-dramaturgy lends tension to the film since those involved could not have known at the time of filming whether they would be able to complete it by the deadline. It is similarly fascinating to watch as the two like-minded women attune to each other mentally and physically despite their six-decade age difference. The lead is taken by the overwhelmingly honest and startlingly natural Fahidi, but her partner also gets an important part. Emese Cuhorka has less to say, and instead of words she uses her body, her movements as a kind of flesh and blood avatar to bring to life the emotional experiences and traumas of Éva.
How was it made?
Réka Szabó had known the distant relation Éva Fahidi for 20 years, she had even interviewed her, and she was aware that she attended dance classes, but the idea of working together only arose when she heard her speak in public. She was immediately taken by her empathy, her wisdom and her toughness, not to mention that she refused to become defined in the role of victim or martyr.
Szabó had earlier made a total of two experimental dance shorts, she had absolutely no documentary experience at all. She made the decision to shoot a film of the project a month before rehearsals started. She deliberately chose Claudia Kovács as a female cinematographer, with whom she precisely set down exactly how and what she wanted recording in the early stages of the rehearsal, but as the premiere approached she was given a freer hand. One of Kovács’s suggestions was that there should be a focus on Éva’s face in the close-ups.
Sóvirág debuted in the Comedy Theatre in 2015, but separate scenes were shot for the film over the next year or so. Editing of the nearly 90 hours of raw footage took much longer than normal due to the inexperience of the director. Finally, The Euphoria of Being appeared in cinemas in autumn 2019.
What’s its place in (Hungarian) film history?
Works documenting the processing of personal trauma have deep roots in Hungarian film history. In Visitation (A látogatás, László B. Révész, 1982), a writer living abroad returns to the village from which she and her family were deported in the war, and Gyula Gazdag’s Package-Tour (Társasutazás) follows survivors and relatives of survivors as they visit Auschwitz. The Euphoria of Being connects to this trend but it can also be associated with those ‘new wave’ documentaries in which the individuals carry out a project – one such is the Nagyi (Granny) project, in which grandchildren take their grandmothers back to places from their past. The Euphoria of Being became one of the most successful documentaries of the 2010s, it received the Grand Prix at the ‘A’ category Locarno International Film Festival, it took the audience prize at VERZIÓ International Human Rights Documentary Festival, and it was voted best in category at the 2020 Hungarian Motion Picture Festival.
A memorable scene
During rehearsals Éva confesses that she still blames her father for not being able to get the family away to safety abroad in time, then in the second half of the film we see how the performance dramatizes her unprocessable traumas. Emese dressed as a dark shadowy figure personifies the father, to whom Éva addresses her shocking monologue about his responsibilities and omissions as head of the family.
SHEINDI MILLER / JERUSALEM POST
“I should have been as famous as Anne Frank” – The untold story of Sheindi Miller
Sheindi described watching her family fragment before her eyes, holding her diary like a lifeline. “Writing was the only thing I could control, even as everything else was taken from me.”
By ZVIKA KLEIN NOVEMBER 27, 2024 10:55 Updated: NOVEMBER 27, 2024 15:48
In a quiet room filled with the soft hum of an oxygen machine, Sheindi Miller sat across from me, finally ready to tell her story – a story she’d held close for decades.
It was a year and a half ago, a month after she’d been released from the hospital, her breathing still reliant on the steady rhythm of the machine by her side. The world around us was in chaos, embroiled in Israel’s judicial reform debates, but Sheindi was focused on a different kind of justice – a justice that required her story to be told, to reach the ears of a world she felt hadn’t listened enough.
I’ve known of her story for a few years, since her eldest grandson, Netanel Miller, became my best friend immediately after we finished high school – and now are (almost) next-door neighbors. My family, thank God, escaped Europe decades before the Holocaust, so to me Savta Sheindi, as she was called, became my direct and personal connection to the Nazi atrocities.
Sheindi passed away on October 28 at her home in Jerusalem at the age of 96, focused and sharp as ever until her last breath.
Her story begins
Sheindi Miller was born Sheindi Ehrenwald in 1929 in the small Slovak town of Galanta, where family, faith, and community defined life. But that life changed when she was 14. In March 1944, German forces entered Hungary, setting into motion a chain of events that would alter the course of Sheindi’s life.
On that day, Sheindi began writing in her diary, chronicling the confusion, fear, and brutality of a world suddenly turned upside down. Her diary would ultimately survive the Holocaust – the only known diary from Auschwitz to have done so.
“I remember the day like it was yesterday,” she told me, her voice low but clear. “We were all gathered in the house – my parents and my brothers. We had no idea what was coming.” She spoke about the shock, the fear, and the hurried decisions her family had to make. Her three brothers were drafted into forced labor battalions, leaving Sheindi and her parents behind.
She described watching her family fragment before her eyes, holding her diary like a lifeline. “Writing was the only thing I could control,” she said, “even as everything else was taken from me.”
The Germans soon rounded up Sheindi’s family, sending them to a brick factory in Nové Zámky before deporting them to Auschwitz. It was a journey that tore apart not only her family but also her sense of normalcy, of humanity. But Sheindi kept writing.
Using bits of scrap paper, cards, and any writing surface she could find, she poured her experiences onto the page. “I hid the pages in my clothing,” she recounted. “Every night, I would write what I saw, what I felt. It was dangerous, but it was my way of fighting back.”
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A voice in Auschwitz
In Auschwitz, survival was a minute-to-minute battle. Sheindi described the harrowing scenes that filled her days and nights – the suffocating hunger, the merciless cold, and the friends who vanished without a trace.
“I watched people disappear every day,” she said, her eyes distant. “Some were too weak to stand and were taken straight to the crematorium. Others just… disappeared. I knew I had to write it all down. If I didn’t, it felt like none of it would be real.”
HUNGARIAN JEWS on the ‘selection’ ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in occupied Poland, spring 1944. This photo is from the ‘Auschwitz Album,’ the only surviving visual evidence of the mass murder process at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (credit: YAD VASHEM/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
But the diary was real, and so was Sheindi’s fight to protect it. “I carried those pages with me everywhere,” she told me, placing her hand on her chest, where she had once hidden the fragile scraps of her testimony. “They were my voice when I had no voice.”
She described the risks she took to keep her diary, hiding it under her clothes, even concealing it under the straw in the bunk where she slept.
After liberation in 1945, Sheindi returned to Galanta, though her home was gone, and most of her family with it. She reunited with two of her brothers, and in 1949 they made their way to Israel, where they hoped to rebuild a life shattered by war. Sheindi married, raised a family, and settled in Jerusalem, yet her diary remained tucked away, hidden in the shadows of her memory.
“No one wanted to hear my story,” she explained. “In the 1970s, there was no room for Hungarian Jews like me. Everyone talked about Anne Frank.”
The comparison to Anne Frank stings, and Sheindi doesn’t hold back her feelings. “Anne Frank wrote beautifully, and her diary is important,” she admitted. “But she didn’t survive. I did. And that’s why I kept writing. I needed the world to know what we went through. My diary is the only one that survived Auschwitz. And yet, here I am, almost forgotten.”
Holocaust survivor Sheindi Miller holding pieces of paper on which she wrote her diary as a child (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Recognition at last – from a surprising source
But in 2020, Sheindi’s story finally found the recognition it deserves – though not in the way she might have expected. It was in Germany, the country that once tried to erase her, that her diary gained prominence. The German newspaper Bild insured her diary for €350,000, understanding its historical and emotional value. They described it as one of the most detailed and compelling accounts of Auschwitz, a singular document that should be preserved for future generations.
Bild was the first news outlet to pay attention to this unbelievable story. The newspaper team spent a year researching Sheindi’s story in Israel, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, piecing together her life and the fate of her family through archival records. Although she became somewhat of a celebrity in Germany well after celebrating her 90th birthday, the elderly survivor nevertheless wasn’t able to reach a broader global audience.
Sheindi’s diary consists of 54 pages, written on scraps of paper and 52 dockets from the Karl Diehl arms company where she worked as a forced laborer. The remaining pages were written on small slips of paper, narrowly filled with her girlish handwriting. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” Sheindi said, shaking her head. “The Germans – the people who took everything from me – are the ones who finally recognized my story. They value it more than my own country does.”She shared how Bild had taken her diary and displayed it in an exhibition at the German Historical Museum, bringing her words to a new audience. “A friend of mine went to the exhibit,” she recounted. “He saw my diary, saw my name, and he fainted. He had no idea it was there.”
Alongside the exhibit, Bild also produced a documentary, Sheindi’s Diary, bringing her story to life on screen, diving into her experiences, her reflections, and the powerful legacy of her words. She recalled the moment she was approached about the documentary. “At first, I was hesitant,” she admitted. “I had kept my story hidden for so long. But they convinced me. They said, ‘Your story deserves to be told.’ And I thought, ‘Yes – it’s time.’”
In the documentary, Sheindi recounts her journey with a raw honesty that transcends time. She speaks of the train rides, cramped and suffocating, where “we were packed like animals, with no food, no water, for days.”
She describes the moment they arrived at Auschwitz, the smoke that filled the air, the burning bodies that were both a warning and a taunt. “I remember asking one of the guards about the smell,” she said. “He looked at me and said, ‘That’s the smell of your parents.’ It was a cruelty that I can’t explain.”
Even as she told her story, Sheindi’s words carried the weight of those she lost. “People think they know what happened,” she said, her voice dropping. “But they don’t. They don’t understand the hunger, the hopelessness, the way we were stripped of everything.”
Holocaust survivor Sheindi Miller holding scraps of paper on which she wrote her diary (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Home in Jerusalem
She talked about the divisions in Israel today and how they reminded her of the old tensions that once divided Jewish communities in Europe. “We’ve rebuilt a home here,” she said, “but we’re tearing it apart with our own hands. We can’t afford to forget where we came from.”
For Sheindi, the ultimate hope was that her diary would teach future generations about the consequences of hatred. “I wrote everything I saw, and I didn’t hide the truth,” she told me. “If my words can help prevent even one person from going down that path, then it was worth it.”
Yet, despite international recognition, Sheindi felt a lingering disappointment in her homeland. “I get calls from Germany, from all over the world,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness. “But here, in my own country, people barely know my name.”
She described how a delegation from the Knesset once visited her, asking questions but never engaging with her diary. “It’s like they were afraid of what they might find in my words,” she said. As mentioned, our conversation took place on a Saturday night, at the height of the anti-judicial reforms protests across Israel. Sheindi, who had watched the news most of the day, wasn’t happy with what she was hearing and seeing. “Unity is what holds the Jewish people together. How can we stay strong if we are shouting and fighting among ourselves? Without unity, we are lost.”
She also spoke of the modern State of Israel as a miracle, something that only someone who lived in Europe before the country was established can understand. “This is our land, mine and my children’s,” she said. “It’s something precious, something extraordinary. But we risk losing it if we don’t remember where we came from.”
Sheindi also spoke about the religious divisions in Israel. Her son is a Religious Zionist, and her daughter is ultra-Orthodox. She lived between the different communities. Commenting on those demonstrating against the judicial reforms, she said: “They say they don’t want religious people, but we are all part of the same nation. Without religion, Israel would not have been possible. It’s our roots, our foundation.”
She added, “The Arabs don’t have to do anything – they just sit back and watch as we hurt ourselves. They’re right when they say, ‘The Jews are destroying themselves.’ It breaks my heart.” As someone who said it like it is, Sheindi never held anything back and would always insist on saying she doesn’t necessarily sound smart, since she “never went to university” and “didn’t even finish high school.” Therefore, she explained why the hate pains her from within.“There were secular Jews who wanted to be like the Europeans, but even they ended up in the same camps as us. It doesn’t matter if you are religious or not – we are all Jews, and we need to act like it.”
She bashed Yair Lapid, chairman of the opposition, who was one of the leaders of the demonstrations. “Who is Yair Lapid to talk about unity? He doesn’t know what it means to serve, to sacrifice. My grandchildren serve in the army, fight for this land, and yet, here we are, arguing and tearing each other apart.”
Back then, there were debates whether members of the government and the Knesset should participate in Remembrance Day activities at military ceremonies. As someone who lost her son, Yitzhak Aharon, while serving in the IDF, she had thoughts on the matter. “I don’t care if the politicians come or don’t come to the memorial ceremonies. What bothers me is when they say it’s all because of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. I’m with Netanyahu, but even he hasn’t done enough to fix things.” She added, “Even if the government doesn’t do what I think is right, we need to work together to protect this land. It’s our duty, not just that of the politicians.”
A significant piece of history
For decades, Sheindi felt ignored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s central Holocaust remembrance institution. Despite the historical significance of her diary, which details the horrors she witnessed and endured, her story went unrecognized.“For 50 years, I went to Yad Vashem and told them to read my writing. Everything is there – how they took our money, what my father and mother said, how they closed the doors on us. But no one wanted to listen because I was from Hungary,” she said with visible frustration.
In the 1970s, the focus was elsewhere, primarily on the stories of Polish Jews or Anne Frank. Hungarian Jews, she felt, were an afterthought in the broader narrative of Holocaust memory.
Determined to preserve her legacy, Sheindi hired Naomi Morgenstern to translate her diary into Hebrew, working together for a year to make the text accessible. Even then, Yad Vashem showed no interest in publishing it. “They have so much money, but they throw it away on other things. My diary is history. It’s the truth. But they didn’t care to even look at it,” she said, her voice tinged with disappointment.
For Sheindi, Yad Vashem’s lack of action was a hurtful reminder of how her story – and the stories of many Hungarian Jews – had been marginalized.
Our conversation lasted hours, moving between memories, reflections, and regrets. Sheindi’s life was one of resilience, marked by a fierce determination to survive and a quiet insistence that her story matters. As I sat across from her, I felt a profound sense of responsibility. Her words were not just a recounting of history – they were a plea, a reminder, a testament.
“I don’t know how much longer I have,” she said softly, glancing at the oxygen machine beside her. “But I’m glad I got to say it. I’m glad someone finally heard me.”
At that moment, I understood the weight of her words. Sheindi Miller’s diary, hidden and carried through the worst of humanity, was more than a document – it was her legacy.And now it’s our responsibility to ensure that her story reaches a world that must never forget.n
The writer’s interview with Sheindi Miller was originally recorded a year and a half ago, but life intervened, and the article has now been finalized. We are pleased to grant her the recognition she deserves and publish her plea for unity at this pivotal time.
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LORE SHELLEY (née Weinberg) – NON-FICTION
Lore Shelley (née Weinberg) was born on February 19, 1924 in Luebbecke, Westphalia, Germany, the only child of a liberal Jewish family. The only Jewish child in her district, she attended public schools until 1938 when she was forced to leave because of anti-Jewish laws. She continued her education at Jewish schools in Ulm and Berlin until May 1941 when she was deported to the Kersdorf labor camp. She remained there for almost two years before her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 20, 1943. She worked as a secretary in the Political Department and Civil Registry at Auschwitz until its evacuation in January 1945 when she was sent on a death march to Ravensbrueck and Malchow. After being liberated by the Russian army near Malchow in May 1945, Ms. Shelley was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. She was a patient in a variety of displaced persons (D.P.) hospitals in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Ms. Shelley was the only surviving member of her family; her mother had perished on February 9, 1943 after deportation from Cologne and her father had died during her childhood. She continued her education during her recuperation and met Sucher (Isy) Shelley at a rehabilitation center in Grottaferrata, Italy. Sucher Shelley, who was liberated from Ebensee, came from a devout Jewish family in Poland. Like Lore, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
The couple was married in Rome in 1951 and immigrated to New York in August 1956. Mr. Shelley found work as a watchmaker and moved to San Francisco in 1957 to start a watch import business, the West Coast Swiss Watch Company. Ms. Shelley studied psychology at the New School for Social Research and received her M.A. in February 1958, after which she moved to San Francisco to join Sucher. The couple worked as partners in the business and their daughter Gabriela was born in 1965. Ms. Shelley received a second master’s degree in social work, from San Francisco State University, in 1978. After obtaining her PhD in Human and Organizational Development from the Fielding Institute and completing her dissertation Jewish Holocaust Survivor’s Attitudes toward Contemporary Beliefs about Themselves in 1983, Ms. Shelley published five books concerning the Holocaust. Her first book, Secretaries of Death, was published in 1986 and was followed by Criminal Experiments on Human Beings in Auschwitz and War Research Laboratories in 1991, Auschwitz—The Nazi Civilization in 1992, The Union Kommando in Auschwitz in 1996, and Post-Auschwitz Fragments in 1997. Ms. Shelley was also an active member of various San Francisco Bay Area Holocaust organizations including the Committee of Remembrance, TIKVAH, and the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
Sucher Shelley died in 2009. Lore Shelley died in New York on February 21, 2011. She was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Scope and Contents note
The Lore Shelley papers document the professional and personal life of San Francisco Holocaust survivor and author Lore Shelley. Ms. Shelley devoted her professional life to documenting the experiences of other Holocaust survivors, primarily those who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The collection provides insight into an examination of Holocaust experience using personal testimony of individual survivors, as compiled and interpreted by a Holocaust survivor who shared those experiences.
The collection is rich in primary source material related to Ms. Shelley’s interviews and correspondence with these survivors and the subsequent accounts of their experiences that appear in her dissertation and later publications. Of particular interest is the data collected from a questionnaire about Holocaust experiences that Ms. Shelley distributed at the 1981 World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem and mailed to survivors around the world.
The papers also document Ms. Shelley’s personal commitment to Holocaust research and remembrance, as reflected in her travels to her hometown Luebbecke, Germany; her involvement in Holocaust-related local organizations; her collection of articles and books related to the Holocaust; and her attendance at Holocaust-related educational conferences.
The collection includes audiocassettes, photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, correspondence, videotapes, questionnaires, manuscripts, newsletters, minutes, and agendas.
The bulk of the collection dates from after Ms. Shelley’s arrival in the United States in 1956 until 2004, although there are some documents related to Ms. Shelley’s life in post-war D.P. hospitals, including medical papers, dated 1945-1955, and family papers dating from 1890. The collection includes documents in multiple languages, primarily German and English, and centers mostly on Ms. Shelley’s correspondence and activities in the United States, Germany, and Israel.
The collection is divided into thirteen series:
1. Questionnaires, 1981
Completed and blank questionnaires used by Ms. Shelley as research for her dissertation. Many of the questionnaires were distributed at the 1981 World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
2. Dissertation, 1982-2001
Materials relating to her dissertation Jewish Holocaust Survivors Attitudes Toward Contemporary Beliefs About Themselves include drafts, a copyright application, and correspondence.
Published Books
The following five series comprise documents related to each of Ms. Shelley’s five published books, including correspondence with contributors and the publisher, photographs, post-publication reviews, research, excerpts, and book manuscripts. In 1989 Ms. Shelley began work on a book originally called Mrs. SS Woman that evolved into a two-volume book titled Auschwitz—The Nazi Civilization. Due to a lack of publishing interest in a two-volume work, Ms. Shelley eventually published the two volumes separately but concurrently in 1992 under different publishing companies as Auschwitz—The Nazi Civilization: Twenty-Three Women Prisoners’ Accounts: Auschwitz Camp Administration and SS Enterprises and Workshops and Criminal Experiments on Human Beings in Auschwitz and War Research Laboratories: Twenty Women Prisoners’ Accounts. Documents in the collection chronicle this evolution. There is no correspondence accompanying Ms. Shelley’s last book, Post-Auschwitz Fragments.
3. Secretaries of Death, 1981-2001
4. Auschwitz—The Nazi Civilization, 1957-199
5. Criminal Experiments on Human Beings in Auschwitz and War Research Laboratories, 1952-2000
6. Union Kommando, 1985-199
7. Post-Auschwitz Fragments, 1964-2004
Raya Kagan – testifying without omitting anything
by Fabienne Bergmann
Raya KAGAN, Women in the Office of Hell, Edited and prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld, Translated from the Hebrew by Fabienne Bergmann, Published by the Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees of France and the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, Paris 2020.
Raya Kagan was one of the few survivors of convoy number 3, the first to deport women, from France to Auschwitz. Shortly after her liberation, she wrote a testimony in the form of an autobiographical account, which goes from her arrest by the French police to her return to France. Assigned to the Civil Registry Office of the main camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau with orders to register the deaths of the deportees, she recounts as exhaustively as possible what she observed.
She did not intend to write a literary work but a simple testimony as complete as possible. However, the rare “talent of expression” shown by its author caught the attention of Serge Klarsfeld; having read the testimony that this young woman had given at the Eichmann trial in 1961, he had assumed – rightly – that her story would be exceptional. He had it translated (from Hebrew) and published.
We discover the fate that was reserved for a young Jewish intellectual, originally from Lithuania, who came to France in 1937 to prepare a doctorate in history. When the war broke out, Raïssa Kagan was unable to join her family in Vilna, as she would have liked, to join her family; she found herself, alone, in occupied Paris.
Suspected of belonging to a communist resistance network, she was arrested by the French police “for non-compliance with anti-Jewish regulations and involvement in affairs relating to German security“. After her arrest in Paris and her internment in the Tourelles camp, Raya Kagan was “handed over to the Germans” (p. 37), then, from Drancy, deported to Auschwitz on June 22, 1942.
She undoubtedly owed her survival – though far from assured – to her knowledge of languages. This intellectual spoke five languages perfectly: Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German and French. Raya was selected to work at the Standesamt, “the office for the registration of births, marriages and deaths and the direction of civil registers” of the camp, p.73.
Her job, which she was not to tell anyone about, consisted of “filling in small yellow forms for the central statistical office in Berlin“, p. 79. Obviously, there were no births, practically no marriages to count… Only deaths to count.
His task – increasingly overwhelming – was to record them: “Before my gaze, becoming blurred, there were names, nicknames, ages, countries. I tried to imagine the ordeal of these people towards the liberating death. I knew the exact number of each one and could estimate how long he had spent in the camp. I gave free rein to my imagination and instead of a yellowed, thin, mute piece of paper, I pictured people like me, thirsting for life and freedom, who loved and were loved and who, in the bitter hour of their death, were alone and far from all their loved ones, from their homes and, what is saddest, died knowing that nothing would remain of them, that the wind would scatter their ashes. But for these unfortunate people, death was also a liberation“, p.79-80.
The disappeared thus registered were only a tiny part of the prisoners who perished in the camp. Those who were gassed were not registered: “Those who are exterminated in the gas chambers do not even appear in the file of the dead. In this way, the traces of their stay in the camp are completely blurred. The names of those who were sent directly from the station to the gas chambers are found in the lists of convoys and these are transmitted to the camp commander“, p.165-166.
The number of reported deaths, however, aroused suspicions within the German administration outside the camp, and letters arrived at the Auschwitz Civil Registry Office asking: “Such a large number of deaths for such a small community?“, p. 190
. The directors of the office found a subterfuge to hide the reality, by establishing “a new nomenclature of figures, secret…” (p. 191): they had established a kind of code that made it possible to count the deaths without their excessive number being obvious and revealing the mass crime.
By virtue of her position at the civil registry office, Raya was therefore able to understand the program of mass extermination of the Jews fomented by the Nazis. “On February 25, 1943, a new order arrived: to stop registering the Jews, who were arriving en masse in convoys (…). This shook us. We understood that the Jews were condemned to be exterminated en masse. The order was secret. Only the two kommandos, the political section and the Standesampt, knew about it“, p.167-168.
Raya Kagan, Witness at the Eichmann Trial/ Jerusalem/ 1961
Raya came to this terrible conclusion: she was one of the sixty Jewish women who “penetrated to the heart of the plot of the camp authorities. In our hands pass the prisoners’ protocols, the interrogations, demands and desires of the Gestapo and the orders from Berlin. Is it possible to come out of it unscathed?” p. 164.
During her three years of internment, Raya saw Jews and non-Jews arrive at Auschwitz from all over Europe. She even met up with her companions in the Tourelles, recounting their fate as well as that of many other women she met. Salia, for example, whose function “was to run from one barrack to another and from one building to another to transmit the orders of the authorities… A guard of the camp guard had sent her to clarify something in the political section“, p. 168. It was through her that Raya and her companions at Auschwitz learned of the horrors perpetrated at Birkenau, which, by comparison, make Auschwitz appear – relatively of course and by disastrous comparison – as a “preferable” place…
Finally, Raya had the unfortunate “privilege” of serving as an interpreter during interrogations of prisoners. She does her best and multiplies subterfuges to avoid the worst for the interrogators: “For me, each interrogation is a new torture. I will never get used to hungry and exhausted faces, to the terror that freezes their eyes, or even to impenetrable indifference“, p. 248 .
Raya is therefore placed in a key place from which she can understand, in all its complexity, the functioning and administrative management of the death camps. She casts a look at this whole system which, to be lucid, is never cold.
At the end of her meticulous account, the reader is struck by the personality of its author and her fellow inmates whose stories she willingly reports, all these endearing women whose portrait she paints. Thus, she evokes, in conditions that do not favor them: the solidarity, the mutual aid, the generosity shown by these resourceful women. She describes, for example, scenes of “literary readings” with her companions, on the boards of her bed: the reading of Faust or other books that the prisoners had been able to get their hands on… “Allday long,” she writes, “we waited for this moment that illuminated a little the sadness of our lives,” p.144.
The intelligence she possesses of situations, her attention to others, her sense of friendship, her permanent thirst for learning and cultivating herself make Raya Kagan, more than a witness overflowing with intelligence, life and energy: an admirable figure.
***
Nothing escapes Raya Kagan’s memory, one might say, hyper-memory. She observes, grasps and retains everything: each situation, each detail, each encounter, each exchange, each place, each date, each word. An avid desire to restore everything makes her story a very dense, even saturated piece of writing: to abandon nothing of her memories, to forget nothing, such is the imperious urgency that determines the writing of this testimony.
Leaving Auschwitz/ January 27, 1945/AFP Photo/ Yad Vashem Archives
When she arrived in Paris after her liberation, the woman who would be an exceptional witness already sensed and feared the difficulty of transmission. “The buses from Paris, old, well-known, perhaps the same ones that, three years ago, took sixty-seven women from the Tourelles to Drancy, entered the city through the northern suburbs. The crowd of Sunday passers-by stopped at the sight of the convoy of repatriates… Their warm wishes accompanied us on our way to this new life that we hoped for so much from the bottom of the abyss. And the heart was anguished…” p. 338.
Róża Robota
Róża Robota
Anna Palarczyk’s adamant statement that there were no gallows in the women’s section of Auschwitz-Birkenau [above] is a contentious one. Having provided gunpowder to members of the Sonderkommando for the unsuccessful uprising on October 7, 1944, four women who worked in the Kanada and Weischel-Union sections of the camp were eventually publicly hanged by the Nazis on January 6, 1945, two weeks before the camp was evacuated. Their names were Róża Robota, Ella Gartner, Ester Wajjcblum and Regina Safirsztain. A fellow underground member named Noah Zabludowicz persuaded the kapo of the torture bunker in Block Eleven, Ya’akov Kozelczyk, to let him visit Robota and he recalled: “I entered Roza’s cell. On the cold cement lay a figure like a heap of rags. At the sound of the door opening, she turned her face to me…Then she spoke her last words. She told me that she had not betrayed [anyone]. She wished to tell her comrades that they had nothing to fear. We must carry on. It was easier for her to die knowing that our actions would continue. It was a pity to lose one’s life and have to leave this world, but she did not regret her actions. She was not sorry that it was her lot to die. I received from her a note for the comrades outside. It was signed with the exhortation: Hazak ve-amatz (be strong and of good courage)! The time came to leave, and I left the bunker. This was the last time I saw Roza face to face, but I will never forget her.”
Janina Nowak
Accounts of women attempting to escape from Auschwitz are rare. The makers of this website believe that Rudolf Vrba would approve of reminding the world of the bravery of Malka Zimetbaum as well as the much-lesser-known Janina Nowak.
Janina Nowak first woman escapee.
Janina Nowak [above] has been cited as the first woman known to have escaped from Auschwitz. Born on August 19, 1917, from Będów near Łódź, Poland, Nowak became prisoner #7615 when she arrived at Auschwitz on June 12, 1942. According to the Auschwitz Museum, she escaped only twelve days later on June 24, 1942 from a Kommando labour unit of 200 Polish women who were working near the Soła River, drying hay. The Nazi guards pursued her in vain.
That night, back at the barracks, her fellow female prisoners had their hair cut in punishment. Only Jewish women had had their heads shaved prior to Nowak’s escape. The prison unit was sent the next day to an SS-controlled farm called Budy, six kilometres away. There they were housed in crude wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed wire fencing, and forced to do hard, physical labour (digging drainage ditches, for instance) as further punishment. Budy was the site for a women’s penal colony that had commenced with the transfer of Polish women on April 27 and May 28, relocated to a former school building. The first camp supervisor was SS-Aufseherin Elfrieda Runge and it was guarded by 25 SS men with dogs. The harsh conditions frequently proved fatal. In October of 1942, female guards used poles and axes to massacre approximately 90 Jewish women from France.
Nowak got as far as Łódz, where there was the largest Jewish ghetto in Poland–although according to the Auschwitz Museum in 2023, she was not Jewish. She remained at-large until her arrest in March of 1943. Brought back to Auschwitz on May 8, 1943, she received a new prisoner number, 31592. Later that year she was transferred to Ravensbrück and survived until its liberation at the end of April in 1945. Her subsequent years are largely undocumented but Marta Byczkowska-Nowak (born in 1984) has published a novel in tribute, What path to freedom? The story of the first woman to escape from Auschwitz, in 2021. A graduate of the Faculty of Polish Philology at the University of Lodz, Byczkowska-Nowak has worked as a television journalist and theatre critic.
Łódź ghetto residents courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny imienia Emanuela Ringelbluma
