Five Chimneys

Five Chimneys, originally published in French as Souvenirs de l'au-delà (Memoirs from the Beyond), is the memoir of Olga Lengyel, née Gross, born on October 19, 1909 in Transylvania (Romania). Five Chimneys is similar to Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici, in the acute powers of observation and memory of the respective authors. However, whereas some of the events, especially those of a sexual nature, are over the head of the eleven-year-old narrator of Thanks to My Mother, Olga Lengyel describes such events with an unflinching gaze. The physical exam (oral, rectal, vaginal) given to the nude women arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while German soldiers chuckled suggestively, is just one example.