Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz
By: Olga Lengyel / Narrated By: Jennifer Wydra
Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
ANOTHER book that starts off exasperating but ends with a bang!
I’m gonna admit something even if it makes you wanna whack me over the head with a crowbar: I think that perhaps I’ve listened to too much on the Holocaust…
Why do I say this? Well, who else would feel exasperated during the first part of an audiobook describing such horrors? All I have to say is that I listened to the opening of Five Chimneys and thought: Same-old, same-old. Cattle cars, no food or water, ho-hum…!
SEEEE?!? Isn’t that just AWFUL of me? But I have to admit that that was where my mind was at. Olga Lengyel takes us into being hoaxed by the Germans to leave their home in Transylvania, and she describes a desperate seven-day journey of hell where people DIED, and I was bored.
Okay, you can whack me over the head with that crowbar I told you to get.
But I digress…
What makes Five Chimneys different from other survivor stories is that it can get a bit philosophical on the side. It’s not just description after description of horrific occurrences, it’s also the thoughts and wider speculations that go along with them. For example, Lengyel worked in an Infirmary of Auschwitz, and in that position killed newborn babies to spare the mothers from an immediate trip to the showers (if both baby and mother survived childbirth, they were condemned; if the birth was a stillborn, the mother was spared and sent back to camp). Olga has many thoughts on the subject and wonders at what she was driven to do. She wonders if she’s as bad as the Nazis or if killing the one to save the other was the right thing to do. Many women were saved from death because of such actions, but she’s haunted by it all.
Then too, Lengyel went head to head with many a Nazi beast and came out living to tell the tale. She didn’t do it out of bravado; actually, she tried very hard to melt into the surroundings, but she was around a LOT of larger-than-life evil people and wound up interacting with them. She played them, played their evil, played their better intentions. If an SS doctor seemed to be doing something good, she wondered if it was because he sensed something, sensed that things were going south and that perhaps he might be trying to set up sympathy should he be tried in court in the future; she didn’t mind. She utilized all that and got the most out of the man. She was quite canny like that. Plus she had dealings with the Underground; I liked that too.
I found it odd that what appeared to be an American, Jennifer Wydra, was chosen as narrator. She reads the chapter names and numbers in unaccented English then goes on to do the ENTIRE following stretch in a very dramatic and almost over-the-top accent. She does it well, but really? They couldn’t get somebody European to narrate it? Maybe it woulda come off sounding a little less melodramatic and seething.
All in all, I liked (if “like” is the proper word for any study of the Holocaust) Five Chimneys. I felt awful that she felt she had a hand in the deaths of her parents and children, felt awful that she lost her husband later before he could be liberated. But I also felt her strength and courage as she left two death marches, the second by gnawing on ropes for three days to unloose her hands, by surviving even when civilians around her died because they weren’t as toughened to hardship and misery. It’s amazing what you can live through once you’ve lived through the worst…
There. You can put away the crowbar now.
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