What can be found in cookbooks written by prisoners of war and prisoners of the camps

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Conditions in the camps at all times were very far from ideal. This applies to both the Gulag and the concentration camps during the Second World War. Hard work, illness, hunger and hopelessness became the lot of everyone who got there. And all the more amazing are the dumb witnesses of the horrors of the past that have come down to our time: cookbooks written by prisoners.

The most beautiful book

In his story "The Most Beautiful Book", the French and Belgian writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt describes an incident that happened to him in Moscow. During one of the events, a woman approached him asking if he would like to look at the most beautiful book in the world. The stranger did not accept the humorous remark that he intended to write such a book himself, and in response began to tell the story of her mother and her friends. The women were arrested and sent to camps on charges of agitation against Stalin and participation in the Trotskyist movement.

In the conditions of the camps, they thought about what they could leave as a legacy to their daughters, whom they might never see again in their lives. Posing as smokers, the inmates shaken tobacco out of cigarettes and collected paper to write messages to children. However, paralyzed by fear, they could not write a single line. The most timid and ugliest of them, Lily, began to write.

She was the first to leave the Gulag and sew a homemade thin notebook to her skirt. Lily and her friends have long died, and the daughters of former prisoners sometimes met and looked at the "most beautiful book", carefully passing it from hand to hand. A recipe was written on each page.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt in 2009 published the story "The Most Beautiful Book", which told this story, albeit in a slightly modified form. French director Anne Jorge became interested in the story.

She contacted the author, who confirmed the reality of the story, named the event she attended. Jorge, with the help of a friend from the Foreign Ministry, found a list of those invited to the Moscow meeting. Another friend of the director helped Anne Georges find the very woman who kept The Most Beautiful Book.

In reality, she told the story of her husband's grandmother, Vera Nikolaevna Bekzadyan, a prisoner of the Gulag in Potma from 1938 to 1948. It was she who, with the help of her unfortunate friends, compiled a unique recipe book. Conversations and memories of food allowed them on the waves of memory to return to a happy past and maintain their sanity in conditions of complete hopelessness. They wrote not on tissue paper, but on small pieces …

In the Kitchen of Memory

In 1996, the book "On the Kitchen of Memory" was published, which contained recipes written down by Mina Pekhter, who died of starvation in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, 30 kilometers from Prague. 25 years after her death, a phone call rang at the house of Mina's daughter Anna Stern, and a stranger reported a package from her mother. She passed it on to a friend, and then this last gift from her mother traveled 25 years and passed the route through Israel, Ohio and finally arrived in New York.

The small package contained a photograph of Mina Pekhter with her grandson, poems written by her mother, and a hand-sewn notebook consisting of thin leaves on which recipes were written. Linzer's cake, goulash with noodles, chicken galantine … Women, exhausted mentally and physically, dictated recipes, and Mina carefully wrote them down.

In 2007, Anne Jorge released a film for cable television, where she told the story of the appearance of the book "In Memory's Kitchen", after which she was bombarded with a stream of letters. In them, people wrote about their relatives who kept the same recipe books in prisons and camps.

Anna Jorge will release another film "Imaginary feasts" in 2014, where she will tell all these stories and interview Michael Berenbaum, project director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He will describe the book, written by the women of Theresienstadt, as "a spiritual rebellion against the rigors of the given conditions," and warn against treating this document as anything other than a vital historical artifact. The value of the book is not in the proposed culinary delights, but in understanding the ability of the human spirit to go beyond circumstances and continue to dream about the past and the future.

Warren Stewart's Diary

He was a student at the University of Alabama when he enlisted and went to serve in 1941. At one of the Pacific bases, Stewart, along with other military personnel, was captured by the Japanese and then sent to a labor camp in Kawasaki, where he spent 40 months. Out of 2,000 prisoners of war, less than 1,000 made it to their destination, the rest died of hunger in the cargo hold. On the way, Japanese soldiers occasionally lowered on a rope small buckets of rice balls that made up the prisoners' ration for 36 days on the way.

In Kawasaki, Warren Stewart kept a detailed diary, where he carefully wrote down what they were fed. It was mainly rice with cabbage and carrot soup or noodles in pork and onion broth. But in his diary, the sergeant described a completely different culinary world. The inmates shared recipes for cream puffs, honey cakes, cherry-date loaves, and pork tamale.

A whole page is devoted to the list of sandwiches in Warren Stewart's notebook. Later, the son of a former prisoner of war Roddy Stewart will say in an interview that it was a kind of escape of the mind while the body remained restricted to the conditions of the camp. Today Roddy Stewart considers his father's notebook to be the most valuable thing he has.

Recipes from Bilibid

Another American prisoner of war, Chick Fowler, kept a journal at Bilibid prison in the Philippines, and his aunt published it in 1945. This book contains recipes dictated to Fowler by other prisoners of war who came to Bilibid from different countries. The book features British recipes and American, Chinese and Mexican dishes, Italian along with French, Filipino and Java recipes. It was a new language of communication, and their food fantasies allowed them to forget the horrors of imprisonment.

Bitter winds

Harry Wu spent more than 19 years in the Chinese camp of Laogai during the reign of Mao Zedong, and in his memoir Bitter Winds: Memories of My Years in the Chinese Gulag, he wrote about how emaciated prisoners resorted to the practice of "imagining food." Each prisoner told in detail how to prepare a particular dish. Everyone literally imagined the aroma and taste of the described dishes, and everyone listened with bated breath.

Most of the authors of these recipes have long since departed, but the records they kept are still terrifying today. They did not save them from hunger, but gave them the opportunity to hope for the future, for a life in which there would be no hunger and bullying. And they saved people from physical and emotional destruction.

Forced labor and deadly conditions are what Nazi POW camps are known for. However, Spiegel writes about an archive of photographs from A "model" camp in Germany, where during World War II prisoners put on plays, played sports, spent time in the library and listened to academic lectures behind the barbed wire.