56 pages • 1 hour read
Olga LengyelFive Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “8 Horses—or 96 Men, Women, and Children”
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss antisemitism, the Holocaust, murder, and physical and sexual violence.
Lengyel states that she feels responsible for the deaths of her parents and sons. She then gives a description of her family and her life leading up to her imprisonment in the Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944, Lengyel lives with her husband, Miklos Lengyel, their two sons, Thomas and Arvad, and her parents in the city of Cluj in Transylvania, Hungary (located in present-day Romania). Lengyel is the first surgical assistant at the hospital that Miklos manages.
Lengyel and her family hear rumors of Nazi extermination camps, including the fact that prisoners are being gassed to death in specially designed vans, but cannot believe that the Germans are capable of such atrocities.
Miklos is interviewed by the Schutzstaffel (SS) twice; he and his family are Jewish. The second time, he is detained. Lengyel receives word that he is to be deported to Germany in an hour. Hurriedly, she packs and decides to accompany him. Her parents decide to accompany their daughter and son-in-law as well, and they bring Thomas and Arvad.
The family, who are assured that there will be no danger to them in accompanying Miklos, are shocked to see armed guards surrounding the train station and a train of cattle cars. They are shoved into the cars—96 people are in Lengyel and her family’s car, in a space designed for only eight horses—until they can barely move.
The journey feels endless. Traveling for seven days, people’s behavior becomes increasingly aggressive and despairing as they jostle for space. Lengyel and an unknown man are chosen as captains to oversee the car.
Nazi soldiers demand extortionate taxes along the way, such as 30 wristwatches in return for not shooting them all, and jewelry in return for a bucket of water. The Nazi soldiers supply no food, only the occasional bucket of water.
Some people in the train car come down with dysentery. Miklos manages to save a woman who swallows poison in order to die by suicide. Others are discovered to have scarlet fever, and the prisoners attempt to quarantine them near the door. People begin to die, and then the corpses start to decompose.
Finally, after seven days, the train reaches its destination.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Arrival”
The train occupants are made to spend an eighth night in the train car. Lengyel peers out of the small window and sees a massive, barbed-wire prison lit with spotlights.
Lengyel apologizes to her parents for her decision to accompany her husband, which ultimately led them to come as well; they insist that she has nothing to apologize for.
The next day, they are released onto the platform, Lengyel is shocked by the appearance of ragged and skeletal men and women in convict clothing. A translator for the camp commandant explains that they need to leave all their luggage and obey all orders. They are told that an ambulance will take the sick to a hospital. Men and women are separated, and very old adults and children are separated from young and middle-aged adults. The chief selector hesitates when deciding where to send Arvad (who is 11, but big for his age), suggesting that he must be 12 (the age at which children are sorted to the right with the adults). Lengyel, worried that he will be made to do the hard labor of an adult, insists that he is 11 and should go with the children. Lengyel urges her mother to accompany the children, which the selector allows.
In retrospect, Lengyel reflects on the ways that they were tricked into submissively going to their death. She is further tortured by the fact that she urged her mother to accompany her sons and that she didn’t take the opportunity to lie about Arvad’s age, which would have saved him from the gas chambers—at least, during this first selection.
Shifting back to the narrative, Lengyel says she was taken with a group of women to a large warehouse. They pass bedraggled, starving, barely dressed women who beg for food or clothing. In the warehouse, Lengyel and the other women are made to strip and undergo humiliating internal examinations. Lengyel manages to keep a lethal poison pill by hiding it in a pair of old boots that the Nazi guards decide she can keep. The women’s hair is shorn. A guard tells another guard to leave Lengyel’s hair, but fearing being singled out for any reason, Lengyel lines up when the guard is not looking and has her hair shaved off as well; the guard slaps Lengyel across the face when he returns.
The women are led to an enclosure in the prison past smoking chimneys; they note the strange, sickly sweet odor and flames erupting from chimneys rising out of the building the old inmates call the bakery. Lengyel learns that she is being held at a camp called Birkenau.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Barrack 26”
The women are led into Barrack 26, a bare space filled with wooden bunks, or “koias”; they feel despair at the conditions. Nights are extremely uncomfortable; the roof leaks when it rains, soaking everyone, and 17 to 20 people are huddled into each koia with only one dirty blanket between 10 women. Food bowls are requisitioned for chamber pots through the night—as the SS were likely to shoot people walking around at night, even if they were going to the latrine—and then used for the meager rations the next day.
Later, Lengyel learns that Auschwitz, the neighboring camp across the train tracks, is a labor and concentration camp, whereas Birkenau is an extermination center; conditions are far worse in Birkenau.
Chapter 4 Summary: “First Impressions”
Some mornings, the prisoners receive weak tea or coffee. The soup they receive later in the day is disgusting, often containing strange items, like buttons or dead mice. Two prisoners carry the steaming vats of soup out each day. Women are beaten by fellow prisoners called Stubendienst if they throw themselves at the soup out of starvation. Twenty women share a bowl, each mouthful counted jealously by her companions.
In the evenings, prisoners receive a bread ration, which always contains sawdust, as well as a spoonful of beet jam or margarine.
Prisoners are allowed to write postcards to family and friends assuring them of their good health. Even though they are forced to lie, many prisoners still take this opportunity as they are eager to communicate with the outside world.
Later, Lengyel (who does not write a postcard herself) realizes that the Nazis used these postcards to ascertain the addresses of others—such as Jews—to bring to the extermination camps, as well as to make these individuals more likely to cooperate with deportation orders if they hear that conditions are comfortable.
Lengyel explains that the koias often collapse through the night, badly injuring many, even breaking bones.
Lengyel learns from a long-term prisoner that her family members (apart from her husband) were killed the first day they arrived; Lengyel is appalled and devastated.
After a day of lying in depressed despondence, Lengyel learns from another woman that her husband is nearby at another area of the camp. Lengyel sneaks out at dawn to the men’s area. She is shocked by the sight of her emaciated husband. They talk briefly; Lengyel tells him about the news of their children and her parents. She offers to share her poison; Miklos insists that she might need it. The men are removed from the camp the next day.
Lengyel still hopes that Thomas survived selection. She asks other inmates who had been on her train, who say they remember him being separated from his grandmother and sent in a line toward the “bakery.”
As she talks, a female camp commandant comes to beat her, but she is protected by a German camp inmate who is in a privileged position because he is a German common criminal rather than a political prisoner.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Roll Call and ‘Selections’”
New victims are chosen for the crematoriums through regular “selections.” The women have to line up for roll call twice a day: at dawn and at three in the afternoon. Often, they stand—or kneel, if they’ve committed an infraction—for hours in rain, snow, or sweltering heat and sun. Those who are absent are found and beaten mercilessly.
Lengyel later reflects on how forcing the sick, injured, and starving inmates into these conditions for hours each day expedited the extermination process.
Lengyel remembers the attractiveness of both Dr. Mengele and Irma Griese, ruthless SS selectors who seemed to delight in the selections.
She explains that if facilities were overtaxed with new arrivals, those who had been selected to be gassed would be contained in barracks or washrooms for days.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Throughout the book, Lengyel describes her trauma and devastation as a victim of the Nazi extermination camps, sharing that she is still reeling from the unprecedented and horrific events she experienced only one year before the initial publication of her memoir. The way she opens the book, however, is not with a focus on the atrocities for which the Nazis are responsible, but rather with a statement about her own guilt and sense of responsibility: “I cannot acquit myself of the charge that I am, in part, responsible for the destruction of my own parents and of my two young sons” (9). Lengyel says that she struggles with an overwhelming feeling of guilt over the deaths of her oldest son, Arvad, and her mother, who were relegated to the left during the selection at Lengyel’s suggestion; this is the group that Lengyel later learns were immediately sent to be gassed and cremated. By beginning the book in this way, Lengyel underscores her grief and devastation in her unwitting role as her family’s condemner and highlights how her trauma and devastation comes not just from the Nazis’ brutal treatment but also from the ways that their deception and manipulative tactics made her an unintentional participant in their atrocities.
Throughout the text, Lengyel continues to expand on The Mass Genocide Committed by the Nazis and how the Nazis expedited and simplified the process by tricking the condemned, such as through ambulances that were allegedly going to take the sick, old, and young to receive care after their traumatic train journey. She underscores how the Nazi killing machine was expertly designed to conduct mass murder with little fuss or objection in order to simplify the process for the guards: “Quieted by such cunning subterfuges, we allowed ourselves to be stripped of our belongings and marched docilely to the slaughterhouses” (29). Similarly, she remembers an officer telling them all with a smile: “In several weeks you’ll all be reunited” (32). Lengyel thereby establishes the manipulation of guards, and their empty reassurances are intentionally juxtaposed with Lengyel’s description of the “peculiar, sweetish odor, much like that of burning flesh” (32). Lengyel uses dramatic irony here since the text implies that Lengyel is smelling the burning remains of the humans who are being cremated. Lengyel thereby echoes the Nazis’ deceptive tactics about their genocidal plans, hinting indirectly at the meaning of this smell without actually naming what is happening.
Lengyel also uses the appearance of the prisoners to illustrate the Cruel and Degrading Treatment at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For example, when she sees her husband, Miklos, she is shocked and devastated to see his degradation at the hands of the camp commandants:
Though I had lost my sensitivity after the first experiences in the camp, I still was painfully shocked when I saw my husband again. He who had always been so fastidious and correct in his grooming—Dr Miklos Lengyel, head of a sanatorium, surgeon, splendid human being—was dirty, ragged, and emaciated. His head was shaven, and he was clad in the uniform of a criminal (59).
Lengyel contrasts Miklos’s bedraggled appearance with his neat and pressed appearance before the ordeal, using the contrast to underscore the extent of his maltreatment at the hands of the Nazis. His meticulous presentation before their deportation denotes his status as a respected and wealthy doctor, whereas now he is demeaned and dehumanized as merely another prisoner, devoid of status or value in the eyes of the Nazis because he is Jewish.
In addition to these literary techniques, Lengyel also documents precise details of her experience, a demonstration of stated motivation to write this book to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities. She describes in careful detail the horrific seven-day journey to the camp in a train car with no food and barely any water. She details the growing pile of decomposing corpses, victims who could not withstand the ordeal. She continues by offering a detailed account of the horrific conditions in Barrack 26, especially the sleeping conditions—in which 17 to 20 women huddle in a small, hard, and cold space, with “one blanket for every ten persons” (46)—and the meager and unsanitary rations from which the women “fished buttons, tufts of hair, rags, tin cans, keys, and even mice,” having to block their noses to be able to consume it (50). These observations not only give Lengyel’s account descriptive detail, but they also provide a thorough testimony of the atrocities that the Nazis committed but tried to erase.
