Fantasy Cookbooks and the Mental Survival of Jewish Women During the Holocaust

Cookbooks created by women interred in concentration camps during the Holocaust impart the story of how food, memory, family and tradition are at the very heart of survival.

In Jewish society there are different roles for men and for women. In traditional Jewish communities, public religious rituals and leadership roles have fallen to the men. Over time, Jewish women have found ways to explore and express their own Jewish identity, through the meaning they find in Jewish practices that underscore the importance of their work as women.

For Jewish women, the story of food preparation and menu planning goes beyond just physical sustenance. This emphasizes the strength of these women as leaders in the Jewish family. While some believe that it is belittling for women to be relegated to home and kitchen, understanding the way of Jewish women and their role in the family shows that this is not the case.

It was Jewish women’s savvy, intelligence and culinary creativity that permitted families to survive during times of economic hardship. When there is already little to eat because of rationing, and the laws of keeping kosher further limit what can be eaten, it takes a brilliant woman to not just feed her family but to provide meals that are appetizing and nutritious.

During periods of anti-Semitism in different countries it was the women who often saved their families by smuggling food. Many women were brought to trial during the Spanish Inquisition because of their refusal to abandon the requirements of kosher cooking.

Jewish women have been the primary ones in the family responsible for food preparation even when they were also the sole wage earners such as during wartimes when many were widowed. Years of hardship and oppression sharpened Jewish women’s survival skills and they have become fierce with their intent to feed their families so they will survive and flourish, even at the women’s own expense.

“Dishes are important because they are a link with the past, a celebration of roots, a symbol of continuity. They are that part of an immigrant culture which survives the longest, kept up even when clothing, music, language, and religious observance have been abandoned. Although cooking is fragile because it lives in human activity, it isn’t easily destroyed. It is transmitted in every family like genes, and it has the capacity for change and for passing on new experiences from one generation to another.” (Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food, p. 11.)

Fantasy Cookbooks From the Holocaust

For Jewish women everywhere, food preparation has always played a primary role in their ritual life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fantasy cookbooks that have come to light in recent years. These cookbooks were written by concentration camp inmates during the holocaust. These efforts attest to the power of remembering favorite family dishes and meals and how these memories can sustain the spirit and the desire to survive.

In a place where the women had very little in common — they came from different countries, spoke different languages, and were at different levels of religious observance — recipes and food preparation was an area that allowed them to forge connections. This helped unify them despite their different backgrounds, something that also strengthened their desire to survive. Memories of home gave them the hope that they would see it and their loved ones again, and provided a sense of familiarity amidst the savage inhumanity they were forced to endure.

The Ravensbrück Cookbook

One of the cookbooks made by women in concentration camps is housed at the Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst with the other Holocaust artifacts. It is a small book, only 10 cm x 15 cm, written in a flowing cursive. While it’s appearance is unremarkable it is almost miraculous in what it represents.

The other artifacts in the exhibit — camp uniforms, confiscated item from prisoners, patches with serial numbers- may seem to dwarf the book in their brutality and hatred. Yet placed in the middle of the exhibit, it draws attention to something that these women created in the midst of a living hell, instead of focusing on what they’d lost.

This cookbook, referred to as the Ravensbrück Cookbook, was put together in 1945 by a Hungarian Jew named Edith Peer while she was a prisoner at at Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. Not knowing how to even scramble an egg as she was barely out of childhood, Peer would sit with the women and listen to them recount recipes and “eat with words”. In Edith’s mind these times became cooking lessons and she was determined to collect their recipes as she intended to survive.

Given a work assignment in an office, Peer was able to steal paper and pencils for the women to use to record family dishes and recipes for special occasions. The 97 recipes included goulash, potato dumplings, stuffed cabbage, paprika fish. And desserts. Many many desserts. Cakes and trifles, biscuits and creams. Nougat cream, sachertorte (Austrian chocolate cake) and kaiserschmarrn (a shredded pancake). These recipes speak of a time when people never went hungry, and the indulgence of sweet confections was a regular part of life.

“If you think of a house filled with the smell of baking, that’s the smell of home.”

Roslyn Sugarman, Head Curator at the Sydney Jewish Museum

A number of the recipes in this book lack measurements and weights for ingredients. Peer noted that these recipes came from women who just knew how to cook but had never used scales, measuring cups or cookbooks.

In Memory’s Kitchen

There are several other handwritten cookbooks that are filled with recipes and menus that comprise a lifetime of memories. Yet one of these efforts went even further ultimately finding a publisher. A group of women in the Terezin camp created this dream cookbook of remembering.

In 1944, on Yom Kippur, one of the authors, Mina Pachter lay on her deathbed. She gave the manuscript to a friend asking that if he survived he take it to her daughter in Palestine, but she had no address. The friend survived but had no way of finding the daughter so just kept the manuscript. Fifteen years later he gave it to a cousin who was going to Israel but when she arrived the daughter and her husband had gone to the U.S. After another ten years a stranger (to this day no one knows who) went to Manhattan, and asked a gathering of Czech Jews if anyone had heard of the daughter. Someone had and 25 years later Mina Pachter’s daughter was finally given the manuscript.Yet another ten years would go by before her daughter could bring herself to open the package.

“It was something holy. It was like my mother’s hand was reaching out to me from the past.”

While the original was written in German and Czech it was translated carefully into literal English so as not to violate it’s value as a historical document. The book provides instructions for making liver dumplings and chicken galantine, stuffed goose neck and plum strudel. And again, lots of desserts.

The recipes aren’t easy to follow as the directions are often incomplete or leave out main ingredients. Some of the pages are also annotated: Mina Pachter’s recipe for garnishing stuffed eggs reads, ‘’Let fantasy run free,” the height of irony.

Take Away

The fantasy cookbooks created by women interred in concentration camps during the Holocaust are powerful statements about how memory, food and survival are integrated in Jewish culture. When undergoing an experience that is unimaginably horrible, these women fell back on what made up some of their most important memories of normal life and home.

Remembering special meals, planning menus for important get togethers, cooking for synagogue events and religious holidays. Food is one of the things that Jewish women use to create a home for their families and their communities. It is no wonder that when in desperate need of a coping strategy, the women in the Holocaust relied on memories of home and hearth and the creation of meals for those they nurtured to help them remain hopeful.

‘’By sharing these recipes, I am honoring the thoughts of my mother and the others that somewhere and somehow, there must be a better world to live in.’’

Anny Stern, daughter of Mina Pachter

How aware are you of your own food culture? Please share your ideas about what food and food preparation means to you in your own culture, religion or spiritual life in the comments below.

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