Irene Zisblatt

Irene Zisblatt, born Irene Zegelstein in 1929, is a Hungarian-born American Holocaust survivor.^[1] She claims to have been an inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp although does not have a tattoo like all other inmates, as she claims she received a series of injections by doctors inside the camp to have it removed. She is most well known for her autobiography The Fifth Diamond. Her testimony is also a part of Steven Spielberg's USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Autobiography excerpts

Irene Zegelstein was born on 28 December 1929, in the resort town of Polena, Hungary, in what is now Bulgaria. Her father was a business owner, and her mother was a housewife. Around 1939, at the age of nine, she was expelled from school.

According to Zisblatt, on March 19, 1944, she and her family were sent to the Miskolc ghetto, which consisted of " a couple of streets around a brick factory." All houses were already full, so her family had to "built a little tent from our tablecloths and sheets, whatever we had in our suitcases, and we lived under that." Two months later, she alleges she and her family were betrayed into thinking that they were being sent to work in a vineyard in Birkenau, Germany. Instead, she claims they were sent on a train to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She asserts she was immediately separated from her family and was the only one of her 40 family members to survive the gas chambers. She states that before leaving, her mother gave her four diamonds to purchase bread, however, not wanting to accept the soldiers' request to put valuables inside bags, Zisblatt claims she swallowed the diamonds and then later recovered the diamonds from her feces repeatedly over the 18 months she was at the camp, sometimes washing them in mud or soup or if there was none available, she would eat her own feces.

With the help of another prisoner, she claims she was able to escape Auschwitz by getting on a train traveling across tracks running near the No. 3 gas chamber. The train took her to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany where shortly after she claims she was forced to go on a "death march" as the war wound down. Zisblatt states that she and her friend escaped during a dark night as they stood between two forests and the following day they were found by American soldiers whose names or company are not known. Her friend, whose name is also not known, later died from disease the following day. She was adopted to an American family two years later.

Zisblatt was one of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors whose story was featured in the 1999 Academy Award winning documentary movie, The Last Days.^[2] directed by Steven Spielberg. The documentary follows Zisblatt as she and her daughter travel to various places, including Zisblatt's childhood town, which she had not seen since her deportation in 1944.

Personal life

Zisblatt now lives in Florida. She has a son (born circa 1957), a public speaker, a daughter (born circa 1963) who is an American Airlines flight attendant, and four grandchildren. She frequently makes visits to American schools to talk about her personal Holocaust experiences.

Criticisms by Holocaust deniers

Zisblatt's experiences as a Holocaust survivor have been the subject of numerous criticisms by known Holocaust deniers, including Holocaust denial activist Carolyn Yeager, listed on the Anti-Defamation League's watch list, a Jewish controlled non-governmental organisation.^[3]

References