Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys is a work of nonfiction within which Lengyel recounts her experience as a prisoner of the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lengyel published her memoir only one year after the liberation of the camp, in 1946. She was living in Paris at the time, and her account was published with the French title, Souvenirs de l'au-delà. The book was translated into English in 1995. Lengyel’s account documents the horrors of the extermination camps, including the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other “undesirables” (including her husband, parents, and two sons) during Lengyel’s imprisonment, as well as the cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners by Nazi guards.

This guide is written using the e-book edition of the 1995 First Academy Chicago publication of Five Chimneys.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss antisemitism, the Holocaust, murder, and physical and sexual violence.

Summary

Olga Lengyel lives in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, Hungary (in present-day Romania) with her parents, two sons, and husband, Miklos. Miklos is the principal surgeon at a hospital which he is director of, and Lengyel is the first surgical assistant.

Miklos is called in for questioning by the Nazis numerous times. The first time, he is released, but the second time, the Nazis tell him that he is being transported to Germany. His family is permitted to come. Lengyel does not want to be separated from her husband, so she decides to accompany him; they are reassured that they will be made comfortable and that Miklos will be working as a doctor. Lengyel’s parents decide to accompany them, as well as Lengyel’s two young sons, Thomas and Arvard, who are both under 12.

The family is shocked to arrive at the train station and find armed soldiers surrounding it. They are then crowded into cattle cars, where conditions quickly become appalling on the seven-day journey. People die of illness, but the corpses are not removed from the tiny space, and the prisoners are barely given any water and no food.

Finally, after an eighth night in the cars, they disembark at a station, which turns out to be the train station associated with the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The disembarked prisoners are relieved, not understanding the horrors that await them. The first selection takes place; Lengyel later learns that this selection decided who went immediately to the gas chambers, which were the old, the young, and the sick. Lengyel’s parents are sorted to the left, as is Arvard, Lengyel’s younger son. Not wanting her older son, Thomas, to be made to do the hard labor of adults, Lengyel insists that Thomas is not yet 12 (even though he is large for his age and could have passed for 12), and Thomas is also sorted to the left.

Lengyel is taken with the other women to a warehouse, where she is made to strip and her hair is shaved. She is tattooed with a number and given a tattered tulle dress to put on. Then she is taken to Barrack 26, a sparse space filled with wooden bunks, or koias.

Lengyel is inducted into the horrific life at the camp. She learns about the gas chambers and the crematoriums and is appalled and devastated to realize that her children and parents were killed there as soon as they arrived. The inmates call the crematory ovens “the bakery,” as they are not supposed to know about the systematic process of murder.

The camp officials feed the women meager, watery, foul-smelling soup, which often contains disgusting items like dead rats, as well as bread containing sawdust and a tablespoon of margarine. Lengyel quickly becomes as thin as the other women. Each day, the women must present themselves for roll call, which involves standing in the heat or freezing cold for hours. Selections are often conducted at these roll calls, where women are allocated—whether randomly, for misdemeanors, or for being ill—to die in the gas chambers.

Particularly feared Nazi commandants who oversee the selections include Dr. Mengele, who selects inmates for horrific, painful, and unnecessary medical experimentation, and Irma Griese, who delights in beating the women as well as in sending any beautiful women to the gas chamber.

Lengyel briefly sees her husband in an adjacent part of the camp; he is thin and aged. Lengyel is chosen to die in a selection but manages to slip away with her friend, Magda. A Polish prisoner working at the women’s camp, Tadek, makes a sexual advance toward Lengyel in return for food. She is tempted by the food, as she is starving, but she refuses.

Lengyel begins to work at the newly created women’s camp infirmary. They have meager, unsanitary supplies, and many of their patients die. Corpses are taken to a rotting pile, the memory of which haunts Lengyel for years to come. In her role as an infirmary worker, Lengyel is allowed to sleep in a more spacious room with the other infirmary workers. Although it is an old urinal with a few camp beds, it feels luxurious to her.

Women who give birth are immediately allocated to the gas chambers as well as their babies. To save the mothers, Lengyel helps them to give birth and then kills the babies; mothers of stillborn babies were not allocated to die. Lengyel is haunted by her involvement in these needless murders.

Occasionally, inmates manage to escape, but they are usually found, punished, and killed in public and painful ways. Others throw themselves against the electrified barbed-wire fencing that surrounds the camp’s enclosures to die by suicide.

Lengyel becomes part of the camp’s underground resistance, which gives her a reason to live. She passes along packages to inmates, as well as circulating news, and delivering messages. Included in the packages she handles are explosives, which rebelling Sonderkommandos use to blow up one of the crematoriums. A few of the Sonderkommandos manage to escape after this, but the majority are murdered.

Lengyel manages to see her husband by accompanying patients to the prison hospital where he is working. Miklos and Lengyel are both shocked by how aged and gaunt the other looks. They resolve to stay alive to tell the world about what they experienced. Later, Lengyel learns that Miklos was shot on one of the infamous death marches as the Russian liberators approached.

Lengyel herself marches from Auschwitz-Birkenau away from the approaching Russian front in January of 1945. The pace is taxing; the column runs through the night and Nazi guards ruthlessly murder any who fall behind. She manages to escape from the column of prisoners with two friends, and sympathetic Polish villagers hide them. However, German soldiers take her as a prisoner on their retreat. She manages to chew through the ropes that bind her hands and swim across a freezing river back toward the approaching Russian army. Russians arrive and liberate the Polish city; Lengyel is free.

Lengyel shares that her hope in writing her account is that the world learns about the atrocious actions of the Nazis; she hopes that these events will never be repeated. She also wishes to honor and commemorate the millions who lost their lives.