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In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin
A beautiful memorial to the brave women who defied Hitler by preserving a part of their hertiage and a part of themselves in this handwritten collection of recipes, proving that the Nazis could not break the spirit of the Jewish people.
110 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
January 17, 2013
In the book Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Janet Theophano wrote about In Memory’s Kitchen: “A group of Jewish women who were inmates in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia dreamed of home and family and a way of life that was being extinguished. The women wrote their memories of food into a cookbook that took over fifty years to reach publication in 1996.”
While starving and facing death, these women wrote their memories of food. Within an hour, I borrowed and began reading this book from the University of Iowa Library.
In Memory’s Kitchen exemplifies the power of imagination and memory on our ability to cope when suffering and confronting atrocities and the endurance of the human spirit.
Michael Berenbaum, Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, wrote in the Foreword: “It is a flight of the imagination back to an earlier time when food was available, when women had homes and kitchens and could provide a meal for their children.” He also noted: “15,000 children were sent to the camp, by the war’s end only 100 of them were alive.”
I don’t intend to cook any of the recipes, but they were interesting to read. Some contain ingredients that I found surprising like brains and goose fat. I would like to learn what type of rolls some recipes list as an ingredient.
A short bibliography, plus a biographical sketch of the cookbook’s author, Wilhelmina (Mina) Pachter, and some poems and letters she wrote, are included.
While starving and facing death, these women wrote their memories of food. Within an hour, I borrowed and began reading this book from the University of Iowa Library.
In Memory’s Kitchen exemplifies the power of imagination and memory on our ability to cope when suffering and confronting atrocities and the endurance of the human spirit.
Michael Berenbaum, Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, wrote in the Foreword: “It is a flight of the imagination back to an earlier time when food was available, when women had homes and kitchens and could provide a meal for their children.” He also noted: “15,000 children were sent to the camp, by the war’s end only 100 of them were alive.”
I don’t intend to cook any of the recipes, but they were interesting to read. Some contain ingredients that I found surprising like brains and goose fat. I would like to learn what type of rolls some recipes list as an ingredient.
A short bibliography, plus a biographical sketch of the cookbook’s author, Wilhelmina (Mina) Pachter, and some poems and letters she wrote, are included.
January 7, 2015
I read cookbooks like novels. I read history and see cultures evolve through cookbooks. "In Memory's Kitchen" is the first time I have seen emotion conveyed through a cookbook. This slim book is heartbreaking and beautiful. It is a testament to human's desire to love and to leave a legacy.
The recipes were collected from women in Trezin by Mina Achter. They were recorded for a variety of reasons including to remember the past, to leave a lasting record of life before camps and to give something to the future. These recipes are a time capsule of lives, countries and cultures that were elinated. It took 25 years for Mina's collection to reach her daughter. On top of the collection was a photo of Mina with her grandson. The love conveyed by the photo is the force that created this cookbook and kept it alive.
The recipes were collected from women in Trezin by Mina Achter. They were recorded for a variety of reasons including to remember the past, to leave a lasting record of life before camps and to give something to the future. These recipes are a time capsule of lives, countries and cultures that were elinated. It took 25 years for Mina's collection to reach her daughter. On top of the collection was a photo of Mina with her grandson. The love conveyed by the photo is the force that created this cookbook and kept it alive.
October 2, 2007
Food reveals much about people and their lives. And such was also the case for those who lived during the horrors of the Holocaust. Included are recipes and memories of Jewish women who lived during the Holocaust.
January 2, 2022
It wasn’t an easy read, but no book about the Holocaust ever is. The forward and the intro were huge in helping me to understand more about Terezín in general. It gave a greater appreciation for what inhabitants went through as they kept their traditions alive. The recipes are very familiar to anyone acquainted with Jewish recipes of the time and area. I appreciate that the author has kept the mistakes intact and offered minimal to recipes as written when translated into English. This way their voices are kept as true to the original as possible. The manuscript itself underwent quite a journey to make it into publication and a story of triumph. It could have easily been lost forever. Here it is though and the recipes are so much more than meals remembered. They are stories of hope for future memories to be made. The recipes live, and because of it, so do those that wrote them. Their legacy did not die in Terezín and their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren take the flavors and memories of their grandmother’s into their future.
January 13, 2023
I learned a lot about the Terezin concentration camp in this book about one elderly woman who died there. The saddest thing I learned was how the German officials "spiffed" the camp up and told people what to say, fooling the International Red Cross into believing that it was a good and humane environment for the captive Jews.
April 10, 2011
While the Introduction to this book is quite interesting, the rest of the book consists of recipes. Despite reviews indicating this fact, I thought there would be a prose commentary or explanation to make up a full book. But, it is simply recipes. It is an interesting concept but would make a better PhD thesis then it does a book.
October 10, 2010
This book is almost entirely a publication of a handwritten recipe book from the 'model' Nazi camp, Terezin. Its interest is chiefly as a historical document. I was expecting a book that dealt more directly with the lived experiences of the women in Terezin, so unfortunately I was disappointed.
May 27, 2010
Can't say I "enjoyed it" but the horror and amazement I felt that a cookbook was made by these women in death camps is beyond description. I am awed to know the story.
January 29, 2022
This is a very moving book of recipes from the model concentration camp known as Terezin. You can’t really cook from the recipes, but they give you a sense of what the women were craving and what they missed from their pre-war lives. They are followed by poems written in the camp that describe daily acts and relationships that are sad and beautiful.
The introduction and prologue are well written (and almost half the book), putting the recipes and poems into historical context and giving background on the main author or the work.
This is a very moving book, and it gave me a lot to think about.
The introduction and prologue are well written (and almost half the book), putting the recipes and poems into historical context and giving background on the main author or the work.
This is a very moving book, and it gave me a lot to think about.
September 18, 2018
Although short, this is an extremely meaningful, sorrowful book. There is plenty of history that can be told through food, and the Women of Terezin (Theresienstadt) tell of their life in the ghetto through half-remembered recipes. It is an act of defiance in so many ways, especially as they themselves were wasting away and surrounded by unending starvation. While there are recipes included, it is not a cookbook, but a way many in the concentration camp chose to fight to keep their heritage alive.
January 15, 2023
On Yom Kippur, 1944, Mina Pächter died in Terezín, but before she died she left behind a collection of recipes that survived, this is her cookbook. It is a collection of memories, history, people, families and dreams…and lots of love. After 2 days, I am remembering the comments by Primo Levi, that if these conditions had continued, we would have added new words to our language for extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion. But still, the language of food is so universal, recipes and dreams of food to share across time and borders forever.
October 11, 2017
This is a cookbook created by the women housed in terezin - a concentration camp outside Prague. The cookbook made its way to Mina's daughter in 1970. In addition to the recipes, which are revealing on their own, some of Mina's poetry that she wrote in the camp is included. Reading the recipes, which include adjustments for rations, and many classic ashkenazi Jewish dishes, was very moving
August 8, 2019
This book consists of a collection of recipes and poems written by women imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the holocaust. I think it shows how they tried to preserve a bit of their heritage along with their sanity and also hope for a possible future while they were being starved. A disturbing yet inspiring read.
August 20, 2018
A fascinating quick glimpse into life at Terezin (a ghetto, concentration town - stop over before Auschwitz). The history is good, the layout is a bit choppy and repetitive. I read it in one sitting and enjoyed it quite a bit though.
January 23, 2021
Interesting introduction and helpful notes at the end. the recipes themselves, leave a lot (to be expected) as assumed or was forgotten.
Want to read
January 10, 2025I checked this out thru PLS & my HOOPLA account on 09 Jan 2025. Continue reading it there.
October 9, 2025
Impossible to read without being moved. Even more stark are the parallels to current events.
March 14, 2016
This book is of special interest for Women’s Heritage Month, and in reference to the exhibit at Central Library, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.The subject matter of this book does not directly or completely address Nazi propaganda, but does so partially and in an oblique way.The setting was Terezin, a concentration camp which also was a transit center, with one section created as "a paradise ghetto" for propaganda, and at the very end as a death factory. From its beginning in 1780, Terezin was a walled, garrison town. Later under Nazi control, Hitler called it “a city for the Jews" and it was used as a Nazi propaganda tool to assuage and deflect increasing scrutiny about the existence of the various death camps. There were special garden plantings, a merry-go-round, and a film was produced showing happy Jewish children warmly greeting Nazi military men. Shortly after the film was completed, all of the filmed prisoners, children included, were killed. Another part of Terezin's history, is that prisoners created a center of culture, art and education. The film Defiant requiem documents some of that history.
Even though they were starving, suffering from malnutrition, and its attendant diseases, a group of women thought and talked about food, recipes, and cooking from their most recent past, and created a small handwritten book on scraps of paper. This was not unique to this group, or this camp, or place. In another part of the world, during World War II, Recipes out of Bilibid was written by men, POWs in the Philippines, held by the Japanese. For the starving to even think about food, let alone write about it, may seem counterintuitive, but not so. It was a way to survive by fantasizing, imagining, and dreaming of another time and place, a place to which they hoped to return. Food was not only sustenance, it was home, family, friends, and what had been lost and was longed for. DeSilva calls it a psychological resistance. It was waged against the unimaginable, horrific present where fantasy, imagination and memory would play a combined role in helping the prisoners survive--mentally and perhaps physically.
This is anything but a cookbook, rather a memoir, which has mostly recipes, letters, poems, drawings and a photograph. The recipes are a testament to the determination and resilience of many women who found a way to survive by talking about what had, in many ways, defined their lives. DeSilva asks us to read and scrutinize the recipes, printed in English along with the original Czech or German.The ingredients for many recipes are lush and rich: real butter, heavy cream, eggs, sugar, and other recipes allude to food rationing: War Dessert, Cheap Coffee Cream. The women who wrote the recipes were very experienced cooks whose world was to create a good home. They took pride and delight in cooking. No detail was too small as DeSilva notes in this recipe for Caramels from Baden, p. 64. The very short description of preparation is mouth-watering, but then perfection speaks to itself, "Then break it into cubes and wrap in parchment and also pink paper."
There is more to this slim little volume, and it is the story of how it came to be published. In Terezin, on her deathbed, Mina Pachter gave the book to a dear friend, who promised to find Mina's daughter, Anny Stern. Determined to fulfill her death bed wish, he kept the book for 15 years until his cousin traveled to Israel, and minus an address never found Anny, who had immigrated there years before.The book then was taken to New York City, and 15 years later, at a meeting of Czechoslovakian Jews, a connection was made. Anny Stern received a phone call from a stranger to say, “I have a package for you from your mother.” Anny felt as if her mother's hand had reached from the grave. Upon receiving the parcel, Anny could not open it for 10 years.
This book speaks for itself, however I strongly recommend the recording of Cara DeSilva at the Culinary Historians of Southern California, February 13, 1999, Recipes as resistance [sound recording] : in memory's kitchen. For this meeting special foods were prepared, based on recipes from the book, and at the conclusion of her talk Cara DeSilva said, " Let us now eat the food of their dreams."
Even though they were starving, suffering from malnutrition, and its attendant diseases, a group of women thought and talked about food, recipes, and cooking from their most recent past, and created a small handwritten book on scraps of paper. This was not unique to this group, or this camp, or place. In another part of the world, during World War II, Recipes out of Bilibid was written by men, POWs in the Philippines, held by the Japanese. For the starving to even think about food, let alone write about it, may seem counterintuitive, but not so. It was a way to survive by fantasizing, imagining, and dreaming of another time and place, a place to which they hoped to return. Food was not only sustenance, it was home, family, friends, and what had been lost and was longed for. DeSilva calls it a psychological resistance. It was waged against the unimaginable, horrific present where fantasy, imagination and memory would play a combined role in helping the prisoners survive--mentally and perhaps physically.
This is anything but a cookbook, rather a memoir, which has mostly recipes, letters, poems, drawings and a photograph. The recipes are a testament to the determination and resilience of many women who found a way to survive by talking about what had, in many ways, defined their lives. DeSilva asks us to read and scrutinize the recipes, printed in English along with the original Czech or German.The ingredients for many recipes are lush and rich: real butter, heavy cream, eggs, sugar, and other recipes allude to food rationing: War Dessert, Cheap Coffee Cream. The women who wrote the recipes were very experienced cooks whose world was to create a good home. They took pride and delight in cooking. No detail was too small as DeSilva notes in this recipe for Caramels from Baden, p. 64. The very short description of preparation is mouth-watering, but then perfection speaks to itself, "Then break it into cubes and wrap in parchment and also pink paper."
There is more to this slim little volume, and it is the story of how it came to be published. In Terezin, on her deathbed, Mina Pachter gave the book to a dear friend, who promised to find Mina's daughter, Anny Stern. Determined to fulfill her death bed wish, he kept the book for 15 years until his cousin traveled to Israel, and minus an address never found Anny, who had immigrated there years before.The book then was taken to New York City, and 15 years later, at a meeting of Czechoslovakian Jews, a connection was made. Anny Stern received a phone call from a stranger to say, “I have a package for you from your mother.” Anny felt as if her mother's hand had reached from the grave. Upon receiving the parcel, Anny could not open it for 10 years.
This book speaks for itself, however I strongly recommend the recording of Cara DeSilva at the Culinary Historians of Southern California, February 13, 1999, Recipes as resistance [sound recording] : in memory's kitchen. For this meeting special foods were prepared, based on recipes from the book, and at the conclusion of her talk Cara DeSilva said, " Let us now eat the food of their dreams."
September 6, 2016
So heart-wrenching to know that humans can inflict this kind of torment and suffering on each other, and what victims of the concentration camps would do to maintain their sanity and some sense of normalcy. Don't read this book hoping for thorough recipes for hard-times, that's not what this was about. This book provides insight into what holocaust victims were thinking about in regards to their food-ways (and, in the poetry in the book, in regards to the people and circumstances around them) and are sparse at best, incomplete or even illegible at worst.
One thing that DID stand out for me was that while it was mentioned that these recipes were meant as a record of the mental exercises that female concentration camp victims would go through to keep themselves sane even while starving and being tormented, the mention was made that perhaps some of them intended record of these recipes so that they could regain their dignity and health through making them after their release (as they trusted would come) from the camps, Terezin in this case. In the light that perhaps there WAS some hope in writing down these recipes for their decedents, I DO wish that some of the recipes had been fully fleshed out, so that we the reader could make them in honor of those women who lost their lives, in honor and memory of their suffering.
One thing that DID stand out for me was that while it was mentioned that these recipes were meant as a record of the mental exercises that female concentration camp victims would go through to keep themselves sane even while starving and being tormented, the mention was made that perhaps some of them intended record of these recipes so that they could regain their dignity and health through making them after their release (as they trusted would come) from the camps, Terezin in this case. In the light that perhaps there WAS some hope in writing down these recipes for their decedents, I DO wish that some of the recipes had been fully fleshed out, so that we the reader could make them in honor of those women who lost their lives, in honor and memory of their suffering.
May 16, 2009
This book is a memoir told in recipes. I know that nothing I say here will do this book justice. This quote from the book's foreward by Dorothy Wagner explains:
"Their thoughts were inevitably and ceaselessly focused on food. Discussion of its preparation and the heated arguments concerning the superiority of one method over another served as more than an anodyne for their tortured nerves. It strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid, not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to."
In such an unimaginable horrific time, these women dared to think beyond their prison, risked death and torture to give their family and their heritage a way to live on. Such a story of hope and strength amidst a torturous way of life. It made me think of my mother, and made the book all the more emotional because of this raw look at a precious gift from a mother to a daughter.
"Their thoughts were inevitably and ceaselessly focused on food. Discussion of its preparation and the heated arguments concerning the superiority of one method over another served as more than an anodyne for their tortured nerves. It strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid, not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to."
In such an unimaginable horrific time, these women dared to think beyond their prison, risked death and torture to give their family and their heritage a way to live on. Such a story of hope and strength amidst a torturous way of life. It made me think of my mother, and made the book all the more emotional because of this raw look at a precious gift from a mother to a daughter.
February 9, 2017
Thoughtful. Sad but a necessary reminder that these women's lives mattered. They were all loved.
January 9, 2014
This is a beautiful compilation of recipes that carried women through the most horrible of conditions, that gave them hope, hope that someday their memories would be their reality again. It's ever so much more than recipes though, there's commentary from family and the director of the US Holocaust Research Institute, there are witty poems...and there are omissions, an egg left out or a whole step, which lend poignancy, a reminder of the conditions these recipes were recorded under. It's a beautiful book. I imagine that most of the recipes could even be reproduced once you convert the measurements. There are one or two that I will be searching for similar directions to!
February 24, 2016
This book is beautifully put together with an informative preface and introduction, providing the perfect context for the recipes. The recipes themselves are haunting. Reading them feels to me like reading the Diary of Anne Frank-- the terrible juxtaposition of the every-day with the dire. I also find myself thinking of my great-grandmother's eastern European cooking and of the incredible art of homemaking in old Europe. Perhaps I will learn to make strudel in honor of Mina Pachter and the other women of Terezin.
May 21, 2023
What must it have been like to be starving and recalling favorite recipes in the Nazi's concentration camps? I hope that recalling favorite recipes was comforting to the women and they thought of their families and had some hope in their hearts for their survival.
Reading through the limited recipe details, I was surprised and then enchanted by the use of the term "snow" to describe beaten egg whites. It was a brief moment of small joy and a testament to the human spirit in an otherwise grim book about WWII.
Reading through the limited recipe details, I was surprised and then enchanted by the use of the term "snow" to describe beaten egg whites. It was a brief moment of small joy and a testament to the human spirit in an otherwise grim book about WWII.
January 26, 2010
A cookbook for reading rather than for following recipes. It's sad to contemplate the suffering of the people in Terezin, but so good to learn that they had lived. The women's act of preserving their beloved recipes made me feel a bond of humanity with them.
July 15, 2013
wow! ...an amazing story about the strength of women held captive, and of how a few scaraps of paper made a trip across the globe into their rightful ancestor's hands. A cookbook? But, nor for cooking.
December 26, 2013
This book is a marvelous intertwining of historical narratives and recipes from the Czech and Slovak Jews (and others) who were interred in the camp during World War II.
April 22, 2009
Nothing like I have ever read-more novel than cookbook, more history of a very personal nature during a very horrific time. Unique and heartwrenching
July 27, 2012
A quick read, but a deep thought. These ladies are inspirational in a time that was anything but.
June 8, 2014
Beautiful and tragic. A treasure that it was saved.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews