![]() ![]() Makler, a freelance journalist and broadcaster, who has been based in Jerusalem for more than 10 years, researched and wrote the book in between assignments. There was this sense I must tell this story otherwise people won't know how quickly normal life can change. "It's sitting at tables groaning with food that is their victory over oppression." "The families these women built are their triumph against Hitler and against genocide," she says. Makler describes Feniger, who has since passed away, as a formidable woman. Not long after, Feniger watched as the British Air Force tragically began bombing other boats, which it believed were carrying retreating German soldiers but actually had concentration camp survivors on board. "She could never go back to that stretch of water," says Makler. Feniger's ordeal was far from over as the boat had landed in Germany and soldiers machine-gunned people trying to leave the barge. Some Norweigian soldiers were among the prisoners and with food and water running out, they collected all of the blankets on the boat and managed to build a make-shift sail, steering the barge to shore. Having survived a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, the then-20 year old was put on a barge at the end of the war with hundreds of other prisoners and towed out to the Baltic Sea by the Germans, who left them there. David ManeĮven more important for the book was Feniger's extraordinary story. "It was very nice closure for me," she says.ĭushpera, a Central Asian dumpling, is an opportunity for the whole family to come together to make them and eat them. In the process she found her honey cake in a recipe from Saba Feniger. She set out to showcase the food of vanished Jewish communities across Russia, Central Asia, North Africa and Europe. Makler wanted an array of cuisines in the book, having travelled extensively in the region. thin sheet, everyone sits around the table to add fillings and shape the dumplings. After Marta rolls out the dough with a curtain rod to ensure it stretches into a wide. And in the Pinhasov household, the making of Central Asian dumplings known as dushpera is very much a family affair. She writes about how Melbourne-based Ruth Hampel, who was in Russia during the war and lost both her parents to the secret police when she was just seven years old, cooks often for her seven grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Makler's longing for the dessert of her childhood reinforced the importance of food as a source of comfort and identity as well as the significance of the kitchen in the family. ![]() "So I began this cooking spree, trying to recreate the same taste and preserve her memory." "My grandmother died when I was in my 20s and somehow none of us had written down her recipes," says Makler, a former Moscow correspondent for the ABC. Makler says the idea for the five-year project – which involved interviewing Holocaust survivors in Sydney, Melbourne and Jerusalem about their experiences and recording their family recipes – came from her own frantic search for her grandmother's honey cake. These grandmothers' tales of survival and resilience, along with their secret family recipes, feature in Australian journalist Irris Makler's unique new cook-history book, Just Add Love, which will be launched in Sydney next week. Survivors: Ruth Hampel, right, shows a new generation how to make traditional dishes. Mimi almost died from malaria, dysentery and an infection but the pair, who now live around the corner from each other in Sydney, insist they are the fortunate ones. Both girls' families had fled to Indonesia from Austria at the start of the war under pressure from the Nazis, the Japanese began detaining Jews in the POW camps in 1943. When the now 100-year-old emerged at war's end, her back was so bent from crouching that it took weeks to stand up straight.Īcross the world, Thea Riesel and Mimi Deitz slept in adjoining bunks in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Jakarta, forging what has become an 80-year friendship. ![]() Lena Goldstein survived the horrors of World War II by hiding in a small bunker under ruined buildings in Warsaw with eight other Jews. ![]()
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