Recipes in this Holocaust Survivors’ Cookbook Nourished Souls During and After WWII

David Lenga was not yet a teenager when World War II began. A Polish Jew born in Lodz, he would lose all but one member of his extended family in the Holocaust, while he himself suffered through the Dachau, Kaufering and Auschwitz concentration camps.

Now, decades after the war, Lenga has preserved a prewar memory of his mother, Sarah — namely, the beloved recipes she made. Two of her pastry dishes are part of a remarkable new cookbook, “Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors.”

All of the 110-plus recipes in the book were contributed by survivors of the notorious death camp. The book was released on September 13, ahead of Rosh Hashanah. All of the sale proceeds will benefit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

The idea originated in a January 2020 delegation of 120 survivors, plus their family members, who returned to Auschwitz for the 75th anniversary of its liberation.

The organizer of the visit was Ronald S. Lauder, the chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation and the president of the World Jewish Congress, as well as a former United States ambassador to Austria. (TO I /VFI News)