Food

Valy Kohn

“The day I returned to Prague, I looked for Evald among all my acquaintances. I asked about him and received evasive answers until someone told me the truth. Everything inside me collapsed. This wound did not heal. I returned, but without Ewald I didn’t have a home.”

Valy was born in 1918 in Czechoslovakia. She lived with her husband Ewald in Prague. Upon the occupation, the Jewish community sent her to the German Office for Jewish Migration Affairs to work as a clerk. In July 1943, Valy, her husband, and her mother were deported to Terezin. In October 1944, she and her mother were sent on to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Valy survived the selection but her mother was murdered. Several weeks later, she was sent to Lenzing, where she wrote recipe booklets on the back of Nazi forms that she found in the street, some of which carried a photograph of Hitler. Subsequently, she was sent to Mauthausen. After the liberation, she discovered that her husband had been murdered. Valy immigrated to Palestine in 1946, remarried, and had a daughter.

After a day of work we went to the barracks. We were very tired and I wrote about food, what somebody said was best; we ate with our thoughts; I wrote what others said about food - recipes. We wrote about food all night; I wrote on what I’d found, on pictures of Hitler (that I found in the street)

Waly Kohn

From Waly (Kohn) Tzimet’s testimony

Rolls (crescents)
50 flour, 5 tbsp butter, sugar, 5 yolks, 5 egg white snow, 5 yeasts heave in lukewarm milk, 2 knife tips of baking powder, bit of vanilla, knead dough till smooth (kneed well).
Wrap dough in napkin and sink into cold water for 2 hours.
Take out, knead rolls, cover them with sugar, cut to rolls (crescents).
Bake in hot oven, while hot sprinkle with vanilla sugar.