PRESERVING THE PAST:

War correspondent Irris Makler tells Susan Chenery how a project to preserve the recipes of Holocaust survivors helped her endure the brutality of modern warfare.

the cookbook inspired by survivors of the Holocaust

The comforting smell of baking in a grandmother’s kitchen, a battered old book with handwritten recipes, covered with the stains of constant use. When war correspondent Irris Makler asked about the story of the cookbook that was always on the bench of her close friend’s mother, it would begin a journey where memories resonate down the generations through the smell and taste of food, where history, wisdom and love come together in the kitchen.

Those recipes written down by her own grandmother were the only thing

Eva Grinston had left from a “beautiful” life with her family before the horror of the Holocaust.

In Slovakia, Eva’s granny had held formal tea parties with starched linen and polished silver. But with the rise of Fascism in the 1930s her father, a political activist, was forced to flee to Palestine. In 1941 Eva, her sister and mother were herded into Bratislava’s Jewish ghetto. When the German troops invaded they tried to hide but were discovered and transported on a cattle train for four days without food or water to the Auschwitz death camp. Waiting on the platform was the notorious SS officer Dr Josef Mengele, who decided who was to be killed immediately and who could do forced labour and be killed later. Vera, 13, was taken to be killed; Eva,15, was taken to be a slave. Her head was shaved, her skin was tattooed. She watched thousands of people die – including her own family – and was moved from camp to camp. Eva was nearly dead from typhoid fever when the Russian troops arrived in 1945. When she recovered she returned to her family’s apartment but there was nothing left, except a box hidden in the basement by her mother. In it were the recipes of her grandmother, and her granny’s friends. When she took it outside and looked up at the sky she could see all the faces from that happy early life, all of whom had been murdered.

She would fall in love with safe, sunny Sydney the instant she arrived in 1950. Now she cooks for her grandchildren from recipes that are loaded with meaning, written by hand nearly 100 years ago.

“Every time she cooked she was recreating those lives,” says Irris. “I asked her to teach me some of those recipes and it grew.”

Sitting in their kitchens while potato latkes sizzled, herb strewn chickens roasted, aromatic Viennese cakes rose, expert hands kneaded dough, Irris began listening to the stories of the women who have survived and bear witness to the greatest brutality and mass murder humanity has known: the Holocaust. All of the recipes had a story. Irris became the keeper of memories. Listening to them was, she says, “a masterclass in resilience”. The result is the book, Just Add Love: Holocaust Survivors Share Their Stories and Recipes. It preserves the memories of the last surviving generation of WWII and recipes from a world that has vanished.

“Many of these people didn’t even have a photograph of their families, cooking the tastes from home was how they remembered their identity,” Irris says. “There was so much lost and when you are a migrant and you have been starving, food is very important. For people who have been hungry, one of their greatest joys is sitting with their families at tables covered with food they have prepared.

“The families they’ve built and cook for are their triumph over hardship and evil.”

Irris completely embraced the feasting that came as part of compiling the book.

“You just can’t say no to a second or third piece of cake from a Holocaust survivor who bakes for you and you can’t say no to a Jewish grandmother.”

Many of the 20 grandmothers and two grandfathers she interviewed for the book had never spoken of the unimaginable horror they had endured, not even to their husbands or wives. They wanted to protect their children. For most of them it would take 40 or 50 years before they started talking about it, and when they did it was to their grandchildren.

There was no counselling for surviving mass murder. Seeing the face of evil up close sets you apart from other people.

“Australia was optimistic,” Irris says. “A chance for a new beginning. They were closing the old chapter and committing to a new life. They locked those terrible memories away until they couldn’t lock them away anymore.”

Baba Schwartz, who was known for the yeast cakes of her childhood in eastern Hungary, survived death marches and said the experience “fossilised” into her. “It became a big, big stone inside me,” she said. She died last year.

Now in her nineties, Sarah Saaroni swims, grows and pickles her own vegetables and makes the jam recipes in the book. At the age of 14 her parents used her “non Jewish” looks to obtain false papers and she joined a Polish work battalion in Germany, working 12-hour days in a cannery. When her cover was blown she became a lone teenager on the run in Nazi Germany, surviving the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and interrogation by the Gestapo. She ended the war working as a nurse at the Russian front as it advanced. Forty years later she started having nightmares, waking up drenched in sweat, heart pounding. It wasn’t until she wrote it all down that she was able to sleep through the night.

Lena Goldstein turned 100 last February surrounded by admiring family and friends. She waited until she was 40 to have her two sons. “She was scared that if she loved someone she would have to lose them,” says Irris.

When she had a chance to escape the Warsaw ghetto, it was her brother who told her to go.

“My brother said that somebody has to survive to tell the world what’s happening here because no one will believe it. He was right, it was unbelievable.”

Lena spent the last six months of the war crouched underground with nine other people in a narrow water channel deep beneath Warsaw, without changing her clothes. When they came out it took two weeks to be able to stand up straight.

Irris had been very close to her own grandmother, whose kitchen had been the centre of family life. When her grandmother died suddenly she realised none of her recipes had been written down. “My mourning for her became focused on trying to recreate her honey cake in an attempt to preserve her memory which was somehow that taste: dark, fragrant and spicy, a little like gingerbread, but more moist. I kept baking but I didn’t succeed. I knew the importance of food and memory.”

She began the Just Add Love project as a tribute to women who have been through war, who have seen the very worst, the lowest man can go. “They inspired me.” She learned if you are going to tell these stories you have to return again and again to the people who are telling them. “You get an overview and talk to them until they are overwrought or overwhelmed or tired, then you go away and think about it and then you come back two or three times. But I love talking about these recipes and learning how to make these foods because that’s the food I grew up with. For these women food became love. I really wanted to honour them because we don’t tell the stories of older women. We do not. And now there is all this rising anti-Semitism, Neo-Nazism and right-wing parties in Europe it’s vital that people know these stories.”

With all the women she spoke to, the stories of why they had survived when six million died had come down to a moment, a fraction, an act of courage, or the kindness of a stranger, managing to hide when everyone else was taken away, someone looking away at a critical moment, a whisker between living and dying. “Every single woman at some stage in her story would pause and say ‘that was another miracle’. Without those miracles they’d not be here.”

There was a stoicism that rose through the grief of losing everything they’d known and everyone they’d loved. “Something everybody said to me after some harrowing tale was ‘it wasn’t so bad, other women had it worse’. Everyone tells the story,

‘Oh my God, I found one person, I found a sister.’ An extraordinary search and then the joy of finding one relative alive.”

It is hardly surprising they chose to move forward and celebrate life rather than let anger and hatred destroy them.

“What they taught me was that you can pick up and rebuild, what happens in your life doesn’t have to destroy you. I’m not saying they weren’t broken at different times or that they didn’t break again but it made them stronger.”

Identical twins Annetta Able and Stephanie Heller were kept alive because Joseph Mengele wanted to do macabre experiments on them, even though they were older than twins he usually chose. He’d inject twins with deadly viruses to see if their reactions differed and kept them in a special section of the camp with dwarfs, gypsies and other human guinea pigs. But because they were Czechoslovakian and came to the camp late in the war, he didn’t get a chance to try out his twisted tests. They believe they survived because they had each other. They would say to each other, “always see the sunshine behind the door and hope brings you further”. The twins are grateful for every day, and believe when people’s stomachs are full they’re happy. That’s why they cook for everyone.

For these women, food is the past and the future as they gather grandchildren in the kitchen and hand down the recipes, teaching them how to cook and where they come from. It is about sharing, giving, nourishing, culture, history, reminding.

“The word ‘grandmother’ is very powerful,” says Irris. “In your grandmother’s kitchen you get wisdom, moral compass, patience, security. You learn generosity, warmth and hospitality, you learn love.”