Non­fic­tion

Hid­den Recipes: A Holo­caust Memoir

  • From the Publisher
September 1, 2019

Before the Sec­ond World War, Ica and Ernő each lived a com­fort­able life in Czecho­slo­va­kia. Their lives were shat­tered by Nazi cru­el­ty, prej­u­dice, and dev­as­ta­tion. Hid­den Recipes tells the sto­ry of their will and deter­mi­na­tion, and their strug­gles to sur­vive. By shar­ing sto­ries about their lives when food was abun­dant before the war, Ica secret­ly wrote down hun­dreds of recipes that she and her fel­low inmates shared. Iron­i­cal­ly, many of the delec­table recipes were writ­ten on the reverse sides of papers that car­ried infor­ma­tion about ammu­ni­tion that was man­u­fac­tured and used to anni­hi­late the Jews dur­ing the Holo­caust. Ernő spent sev­er­al years in var­i­ous Hun­gar­i­an forced labor units, where he was required to per­form stren­u­ous man­u­al labor. He coura­geous­ly escaped with the help of right­eous peo­ple, which saved his life. Hid­den Recipes is a sto­ry of endurance, the will to sur­vive, courage, faith, and find­ing joy and hap­pi­ness again.

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