Two Stories To Remember the Past
Wilhelmina Pachter's triumphant legacy.
The world was so different in 2021 when I wrote these two stories. They are about a collection of recipes that women in Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, related to Wilhelmina (Mina) Pachter. Written on bits of paper scrounged around the camp, she organized it into a cookbook and sewed the pages together with a bit of thread.
I’ve given the opening paragraph of each story. The first leads to the telling of how Mina’s book survived and came into the world. The second reveals a few of the women’s recipes. When read together, the stories give a clearer picture of the survival strength that comes from sharing our table with one another, even in the darkest times. It’s something to remember even more now.
The Glorious Cookbook of the Terezín Concentration Camp
Wilhelmina Pachter’s triumphant legacy.
It may seem strange to commemorate Yom Kippur by talking about food. But this is also the holiday when Wilhelmina (Mina) Pachter died in 1944 at Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She was 72 years old. Before she died, she handed a manuscript of a cookbook to a friend who somehow survived the camp. Several pages long and carefully bound by thread, the book represented the collective memories of Mina and other women who countered their starvation and hardships by sharing recipes they once made for their family and friends. She wanted her friend to give it to her daughter, Anny Stern, who immigrated with her family to Palestine shortly after the German Army seized Czechoslovakia. The cookbook would be a link to the life she wanted her daughter to remember, the one the camp failed to extinguish.
Memories of a Wonderous Feast
More recipes from the women of the Terezin concentration camp
The recipes below tell the story of a cookbook created by Mina Pachter and other doomed women who were imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin. Mina died in 1944 on Yom Kippur. Her daughter, Anny Stern, published the cookbook, now entitled In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, in 1996. It would be good if you read the previous post for a fuller understanding of the cookbook’s history and importance.
“You imagined it [life] even better than it was, and that’s how it was with food, also. Talking about it helped you.” --Bianca Steiner Brown, a former inmate of Terezin, as quoted by Cara De Silva in her introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen.
What a glorious and heartbreaking story. Thank you for sharing it.