In 1944, Hungarian physician’s assistant Olga Lengyel was deported to Auschwitz along with her parents, husband, and two sons. She was put to work in the Auschwitz infirmary, where she also secretly toiled for a French underground cell, helping to demolish a crematory oven. At the end of the war, she was the only member of her family to survive.
Lengyel made her way to New York and, in 1946, published "Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz," which became one of the earliest testimonies to depict the barbarism of the Nazis. Thirty years later, her vivid exposé of the death camps inspired William Styron’s award-winning novel "Sophie’s Choice."
20 years after Lengyel’s death in April 2001, the Museum and The Olga Lengyel Institute explore her remarkable life and legacy. The program is moderated by Dr. Sara R. Horowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at York University and an expert in women and the Holocaust, and features David A. Field, Chairman of the Institute’s Board of Directors; Nancy Fisher, Museum Trustee who conducted a four-hour interview with Lengyel in 1998 for the USC Shoah Foundation; and Robert Jan van Pelt, world-renowned scholar and Chief Curator of "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away."
