Holding Onto A Flame: Recipe Telling at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

Holding Onto A Flame: Recipe Telling at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp is a personal memoir that interweaves, thematically and narratively, my mother’s Holocaust experience with my own history as a Second Generation survivor trying to understand and come to terms with what the Holocaust means⁠—to the past, to the present, and to the future. At the heart of the book, driving the narrative, is the extraordinary recipe collection my mother recorded while her fellow Ravensbruck internees were “telling” recipes during the last months of the war. The significance of the recipes goes far beyond its place in our lives and its humble appearance. In telling a most human story of suffering, defiance, and hope, they become a testament to the women’s unique survival skills and the transformational power of food and fellowship.

When I was a child, the Holocaust lived in our kitchen drawer. I discovered it one day when a nose-tingling fragrance drew me from my child’s play to the kitchen counter. My mother was standing over a steaming pot, consulting a small, strange-looking recipe book. Innocently, I asked what it was, having no idea of the enormity of the crack that I was opening. “I wrote it in concentration camp,” my mother said, “while the women were talking about cooking.” And she tucked the recipe book back into the drawer. I was dumbfounded, my stomach in knots. The Holocaust was a forbidden subject in our family and I had just unknowingly breached the rules. There was no punishment, only my mother’s measured indifference. The presence of the recipe collection in our home turned on an unrelenting curiosity in me about the Holocaust and my mother’s experience of it that would run my life from that day forward.

Holding Onto A Flame is part memoir, part Holocaust biography. It feeds off a small, yellowing notebook which holds over two hundred recipes recorded in pencil in the dim, dirty barracks as the starving women prisoners huddled to feast in their imagination, sharing recipes they might never again have the chance to prepare. Recipe sharing in concentration camps is a known phenomenon as mentioned in the Forward by Yehudit Inbar, past Director of Yad Vashem Museums in Jerusalem. Few women had the capacity to create these collections. Only a sampling of them made it out of the camps, and even fewer have survived the years since.

The narrative winds through the movement in both my mother’s and my life: from country to country and continent to continent; from my mother’s life in Hungary, her Ravensbruck experience, her escape with me as a baby from Communist Hungary to Israel; my move to the U.S.; and her last move to join me and my family in Los Angeles. All the while our lives keep entwining in new ways as my own family and professional career expanded. Yet underlying the changes and demands and the passage of time is my constant striving to get to the heart of my mother’s Holocaust experience, as well as my evolving perspectives of my own Jewish identity. We had our moment of truth late in her life, a moment that filled us with light and love and propelled yet another path forward for both of us⁠—including, after my mother’s death, my own trip to Ravensbruck where, finally, I laid the past to rest.

The book concludes with the translated recipes themselves.