Olga Lengyel was a survivor of Auschwitz and author of Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz. Published in 1947, it was one of the first accounts of the horrors of the Nazi extermination plan. An American immigrant and philanthropist, Olga dedicated herself to remembering the martyrs and lessons of the Holocaust so that such atrocities would never happen again. Those education programs were initially organized under the auspices of the Memorial Library and Art Collection of the Second World War. TOLI was established to honor Olga’s work and memory and was incorporated in 2014 as a 501c3 non-profit organization.
Olga Lengyel was born in 1908 in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania (now in Romania) to a Jewish family. She studied medicine in Cluj, where she met her husband, Dr Miklós Lengyel. They had two children. Together they opened a medical sanitorium, headed by her husband. In May 1944, she and her parents, husband, and two sons were forced into a cattle car and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp. Olga was the only member of her family to survive.
Following liberation, Olga headed to New York, by way of Odessa and France. In 1947, her book, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, was published, one of the earliest testimonies to depict the atrocities of Auschwitz. Thirty years later, her vivid exposé of the death camp became one of the haunting testimonies that inspired William Styron’s award-winning novel, Sophie’s Choice.
Olga eventually remarried and moved to Havana with her new husband, Gustav Aguire, only to be ousted by Castro’s communist revolution. New York beckoned once again. Here, Olga founded the Memorial Library and Art Collection of Second World War, chartered by the University of the State of New York. The Olga Lengyel Institute, headquartered in her elegant residence, is part of Olga’s legacy, carrying on her mission of actively educating future generations about the Holocaust, other genocides, and the importance of human rights.
Olga died in 2001.
“We have to prevent similar atrocities from happening again. People should come together the moment there is danger. Endangering one group means endangering all of us.”
– Olga Lengyel
Olga Lengyel Shoah Foundation Testimony
Olga Lengyel made it her mission to let the world know about the atrocities of Auschwitz in the hopes that such horrors would never befall other societies again. In this excerpt from her University of Southern California Shoah Foundation interview, Olga speaks frankly about her guilt surrounding the fate of her family, and her driving need to begin work on her autobiography, Five Chimneys, while living in Paris after the end of World War II.
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz
From the Midwest Book Review:
“Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel’s work in the prisoners’ underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. Today, with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, and neo-Nazis on the rise in Western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. Five Chimneys is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist.”
Download Chapter II: The Arrival
Download Chapter XX: The Underground