Olga Lengyel

Olga Lengyel (October 19, 1908–April 15, 2001) was a Hungarian woman who became a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and later wrote about her experiences in her book Five Chimneys.

Life and career

Olga Lengyel was a trained surgical assistant in Kolozsvar, Hungary, working in the hospital where her husband, Dr. Miklos Lengyel, who was director. Suddenly she was deported with her husband, parents and children to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, south-west Poland, in the spring of 1944. She was the only member of the family who survived. She wrote about her experiences in the Holocaust in her autobiography, Five Chimneys: A Woman's True Story of Auschwitz, first published in 1947 as I Survived Hitler's Ovens.^[1] These kinds of experiences made her a strong and independent woman. Her children died in the gas chamber. "I cannot acquit myself of the charge that I am, in part, responsible for the destruction of my own parents and of my two young sons. The world understands that I could not have known, but in my heart the terrible feeling persists that I could have, I might have, saved them." Chap. I, p. 11 After the war, she emigrated to the United States. According to the website of the Memorial Library, Olga founded the Memorial Library, located at 58 East 79th Street, which was chartered by the University of the State of New York.

She died in 2001 at the age of 93, having battled and survived three separate bouts of cancer.

In 2006, the Memorial Library began the Holocaust Educator Network, a national program for teachers interested in committed to Holocaust education, especially in rural schools and small towns, in a partnership with the National Writing Project's Rural Sites Network. The program is directed by Dr. Sondra Perl, author of On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate.

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See also

• List of Holocaust survivors

References