FROM AUSCHWITZ WITH LOVE

Two sisters recount their terrifying experience in Auschwitz and their extraordinary survival.

Ruth and Manci Grunberger were both born in the 1920s in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, a small city at the base of the Carpathian Mountains. They lived a quiet, happy life free from any visible antisemitism and in a community that was largely isolated from the gathering storms that threatened Europe. That life changed once their land was annexed by Hungary in 1938. As Jews, they were forced to wear yellow stars, their father’s store was confiscated, and they were ejected from their home and forced to live in the Jewish ghetto. When the Germans arrived, they were sent on cattle cars to Auschwitz; Manci ruefully remembers it as “my life’s black day.” The sisters’ experiences were gruesome. Ruth puts it poignantly: “All the horrors that had been told were true. These innocent people, just off the trains, were being gassed to death and their lifeless bodies taken to the ovens and burned—the flames, the thick smoke, the heavy dust particles and the putrid odors were from bodies. Somehow, I managed to get back to the barracks. I was in shock and was screaming, ‘I know! I know everything!’ ” Seymour, the son-in-law of Manci, intelligently facilities the telling of the sad but ultimately inspiring tale. The entire Grunberger family was sent to Auschwitz, and Ruth and Manci were the only survivors, but their book is not a lamentation—they both managed to make their way to the United States following the war and start afresh. Of course, this is ground well covered in scholarly and literary terms, though the perspectives of women, particularly those subjected to the “death marches” in 1945, aren’t widely represented. This is a profoundly moving story courageously told, one that reveals the heights and depths of human possibility.

A remarkable tale, dramatically affecting and historically significant.