(Jewish Group) Food was a comfort for Auschwitz survivors. A new cookbook showcases their recipes --

[Behind the Aegis]

Food was a comfort for Auschwitz survivors. A new cookbook showcases their recipes — and resilience.

Eugene Ginter was 12 days shy of his sixth birthday when he was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945. Emaciated and alone, Ginter landed first in a hospital and then in an orphanage in Krakow, the Polish city where he was born. Several months later, miraculously, he was reunited with his mother.

Her first order of business was to help him regain weight and health, but he had no interest in food after being deprived of it for so long. So she created a rich sandwich made of things she knew he liked: black bread thickly coated with butter and finished with grated dark chocolate.

Eight decades later, that “Chocolate Sandwich” is the first recipe in “Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors,” a new cookbook that showcases recipes that connected survivors to the worlds they lost and gave them comfort as they built new lives after the Holocaust.

“She connected food and feeding to life and survival,” said Joe Finkelstein about his mother Goldie, who was famous for serving overabundant quantities of food and whose recipes appear 11 times in the book. “Food was her way to give security and it also gave her some control.”


Mamaliga is a typical Romanian side dish made from feta cheese and cornmeal that Alexander Spilberg’s mother often served with plum jam. (Ellen Silverman)

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