I previously read The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Woman Survived the Holocaust, by Edith Beer, which gave an account of one Austrian woman’s journey through WWII and several German Concentration camps.

When we are introduced to Edith, she is a young woman from a middle class Jewish family with aspirations to become a lawyer. This was a very ambitious goal for a woman in the 1930s considering most girls did not graduate high school. Edith attributed her education to the support of her father. Her father was the owner of a restaurant prior to the war.

Edith survived the holocaust, although her family did not, largely due to her use as a worker and later her ability to obtain fake papers. She marries a Nazi officer, has a child, and later flees the country as the Soviet’s take over.

Her story and the loss of her family due to the war led me to thinking about food traditions. Religious celebrations are often centered around food which has cultural significance and can be passed down through generations. Part of the holocaust was a direct attack against Jewish culture and family, so it is logical that these food traditions would also have been lost.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum sheds some light on the survival of food traditions through the holocaust. One cookbook, written by Eva Ostwalt between 1943 and 1945 while she was imprisoned at Ravensbrück, still survives. Similarly to Edith and many other Holocaust survivors, most of Eva’s family did not survive the war. Two of the recipes can be viewed online for apricot dumplings and a Hungarian omelette.

Dumpling Recipe: 300g potatoes, 80g semolina, 150g potato flour, pinch salt, pinch sugar, 1 egg. Knead everything together, form a wrapper,
fill with apricots and a piece of sugar and
cook in boiling saltwater. Add butter and
breadcrumbs on top.

Hungarian omelette: Cut green and red pepper thinly and stew with parsley, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms and optionally some brain. Add beaten eggs and bake it as an omlette.

What would be the purpose of recording these recipes during a time of suffering and starvation within a camp? Some have speculated it was to connect with humanity, remember the past, or to connect with other women at the camp through a universal language. I believe it may have been to record family food traditions for the future. This would serve not only to preserve culture but also could give the writer hope for a brighter future.