They Cooked to Survive

The recipes in this book are almost placeholders, scattered among the history lessons and riveting anecdotes of the Sternberg family’s life.

The title Recipes from Auschwitz sounds oxymoronic. While suffering starvation, deprivation, and torture in concentration camps, could anyone actually cook? Perhaps because of that, I was motivated to read Dr. Alex Sternberg’s recently released book and find out for myself what it was all about. Did the inmates have food to cook in Auschwitz? Could they have carved a moment in the day while struggling to fill their work quotas, find a few crumbs of bread, and avoid beatings to prepare recipes?

The answer is obviously a resounding no. And yet, here it is — a collection of several dozen recipes, memorized by a young woman in the concentration camps and written down in detail after the war. Part cookbook, part history book, Recipes from Auschwitz gives a detailed account of Hungarian Jewry for two millennia, following the lives of the Sternberg family and interspersed with Hungarian recipes during the long, dark nights in Auschwitz.

I set up an interview with Dr. Sternberg and spent a fascinating hour hearing bits and pieces of his eclectic life. A fluent Yiddish-speaker born in Hungary, Dr. Sternberg lived in Vienna for a year before emigrating to Boro Park as a young teen. He attended Mesivta Torah Vodaath and an all-black karate school simultaneously, becoming one of America’s top ten karate champions while practicing pediatric pulmonary medicine. But why did he write this particular book? And what did he want readers to gain from it?