Memory and Invention in Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys

Abstract

Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys was one of the first Auschwitz memoirs to be published after the war, the English translation appearing in 1947. At the time virtually nothing was known about the death camp, so readers had few historical facts to help determine the accuracy of her narrative. Since then the work has been reprinted many times up to the present day, the text remaining unchanged. No contemporary reviewer challenged the authenticity of her account, and since then numerous scholars have cited her report without questioning the trustworthiness of the stories she tells about her various roles in the daily life of the camp. In fact, the memoir is so cluttered with false details and fantasy scenarios that, as this essay attempts to show, it can no longer be considered a reliable source of information about the Auschwitz death camp. Although Lengyel was trained as a nurse assistant by her surgeon husband before the war, she deliberately creates the impression that she was a doctor, and is named as such by several commentators. She so inflates the numbers of inmates gassed that one reviewer declared as many as fifteen million victims must have been murdered there. But her most egregious claim is that the gunpowder intended to blow up one of the crematoriums in the Sonderkommando revolt of October 1944 (it was actually burned down, not blown up) was supplied by Soviet partisans who buried it in gardens outside the camp. Other prisoners later dug it up and brought it to her, and as a member of the underground she says she was able to transfer it to the members of the Sonderkommando to support their uprising. Of course, none of this is true. One can only guess at her motives, which perhaps included a need to restore for herself a sense of agency in a situation where she had none, and thus to project to her readers an image of heroic resistance that never really existed.