Currently reading
Alex
The Glass Room
Peter the Great: His Life and World
If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
Skin Deep
The Good Daughter
A Boy in Winter
The Tie That Binds
The Idiot (Everyman's Library, #254)
The Velvet Hours
Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz
A moving and emotional true account of Olga Lengyel, a survivor of Auschwitz and a woman who has Given the world a heartbreaking but frank account of her seven months as a prisoner of the concentration camp. Not a word is wasted in the vivid and shocking account.I have read numerous books on the concentration camps and am still shocked by what I read and Five Chimneys is a difficult and emotional read but an important story that was originally published in 1946 under the name of Souvenir de l’au-dela as this brave woman was determined to have the shocking details of the camps documented as quickly as possible so as the world would know the extent of the atrocities that was was committed by the Nazis. She was the sole surviving member of her immediate family and her account and story deserves to be read and listened to. I can only imagine that when the camps were librated many of the suvivours were left without voices, unable to relive the horrors and the pain they endured and afraid to speak out which makes these written accounts all the more important and they should be read by YA in schools all over the world.
This is a relatively short account page wise and yet it took me days to listen to as it is intense and emotional and I found myself exclaiming out loud so many times. Olga Lengyel writes at the beginning of this book that she feels responsible for the deaths of her parents and sons as she chose to accompany her husband who had been detained and was to be deported from Romania to Germany and how she had to live her whole life with this torture along with everything else she had endured, how would anyone ever have known the evils that were taking place and she was in no way responsible for what happened to her family and was just doing her best to stay together as a family.
Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her ""very frank, very well written book”
It’s books like this that make historical fiction stories on the Concentration camps pale in comparison for me and why I think works like this should be read and discussed in schools least we should ever forget.
I listened to this non fiction book on audible and the narration was pretty good.
