“Hitler’s ovens”, by Olga Lengyel, the first published testimony of a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camps

In 1943, Dr. Miklos Lengyel, the husband of Olga is Polish, was sent to Germany to work in a hospital. The whole family, the children and the two parents, traveled on board a train full of people who did not know, or even had an intuition, of the cruelty of their fate. The place they were going was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The horrors of war and the many attempts to survive were recorded by Olga is Polish in a text he later titled “The Five Chimneys” This is the first testimony from a survivor of the Holocaust and Auschwitz concentration camps, published in 1947.

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The five chimneys Lengyel referred to in his text were the Birkenau crematoria in which the bodies of millions of people were burned daily. In his story, he records in detail the barbarism of this place and manages to record the dramas of those with whom he shares and whom he sees die before his eyes, including his children, who also died inside these ovens.

Over the years, Lengyel’s testimony has become a key element in understanding the misfortune of that time. The document has changed its title, for commercial purposes, and has been renamed, leaving out euphemisms, “Hitler’s Ovens”.

Published in different languages, the latest Spanish edition is run by Planeta Group, Barcelona, ​​which brings readers this heartbreaking tale of one of the darkest periods in human history.

There are 236 pages that make up “Hitler’s Ovens”throughout which its author manages not only to denounce the tragic events, but also to enlighten readers with a piece of high caliber, speaking in particular of its literary value.

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In the ovens, 360 people were piled up every half hour, who were then reduced to ashes, for a total of 17,280 corpses every 24 hours. Added to them are the nearly 8,000 human beings who died of starvation or forced labor, and those who were simply executed and buried in mass graves. Every day the number of people who fell under the Nazi yoke was about 24,000.

The smoke of the scorched flesh of these thousands of innocent people, including the author’s parents, is felt with great intensity in the lines of this heartbreaking story, a rigorous and extremely human chronicle of the most sinister genocide of the 20th century. . .

“Hitler’s Ovens” it shares importance with the stories of Primo Levi, which were essential as testimony to understanding the reality of the war; however, that of Lengyel, although important, still owes its recognition as one of the essential testimonies of this period.

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In these pages, the readers will be confronted with the scientific experiments carried out by the Nazis with the Jews and other living beings; they will discover how were and how they acted those who ran the concentration camps; they will meet Joseph Kramer, the number one criminal in the Lüneburg trial; They will relive the drama of the narrator before his decisions, such as having taken his family to Auschwitz, or having lied about his son’s age by saying that he was a minor, just to save him from forced labor. Those who could not work were executed.

Your experience in the nursing site; the hell he went through to feed himself, allowing his body to be abused; its absolute resistance to degradation. everything recorded Olga is Polish in this book which preserves the scars and marks of the captive.

After the publication of her testimony, after surviving everything and grieving the death of her husband and children, Albert Einstein he told Lengyel that his words were a true service to humanity, “by enabling those who are already silenced and almost forgotten to speak”.

Olga Legyel she was Romanian. He was born in 1908 and died in 2001, aged 93, after facing the greatest horror and surviving three different bouts of cancer. He was among those who took part in the rebellion that destroyed one of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. His testimony at the Bergen-Belsen trial against Dr. Joseph Mengele it was straightforward.

After the war, she emigrated to the United States and, although she was a doctor, she devoted herself to writing and reading. He founded a bookstore at 58 East 79th Street in midtown Manhattan, sponsored by the State University of New York: The Library Memorialy.

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