Autobiographies are sometimes hard to read and get into, but Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel was a hard book to put down. Lengyel’s life was not easy, but she survived and this book is her tale. From living through Auschwitz to the loss of loved one’s dear to her, it’s hard to imagine that this is a true story and not a horror story written from other people’s points of view. Lengyel and her family lived in Cluj, Transylvania, where she was a medical assistant and her husband was a doctor. Though neither of them were Jewish, her husband was called on by the Nazi’s to be deported. Even though she wasn’t ordered to, Lengyel chose to stand by her family, with the idea that if they stuck together they could get through anything life threw at them. Under the impression they were going to be working in a German hospital, they arrived at Auschwitz unassuming and were shocked when they realized her husband was being accused for treason against the Nazi’s. When they arrived at the camp, Lengyel assumed the different lines containing children and older adults were to separate the categories, and sent her sons and parents to the lines that they fit in. She never…show more content… We find that Lengyel and her husband were in different camps, and using her background, Lengyel is able to travel to him camp as a nurse, where he reminds her she needs to keep surviving and not bow down to the situation. Later in the book we learn about his death, and the toll it takes on Lengyel but she keeps going and even escapes during an evacuation of a camp. She may have been caught that time, but she escapes again and recalls swimming across a freezing cold river and straight into the path of the Russian army. At the end of the book, Lengyel ties her swim into a mass killing of children she witnessed; they were frozen, dunked into ice
