Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

This true story of Olga Lengyel's Auschwitz experience is truly heart wrenching and frank. She relays the most heinous living conditions and brutal "man's inhumanity to man" experiences I have ever read. It is hard to imagine such terrifying ordeals and live to tell about them. Reading a book like this makes all our mediocre problems in life disappear in comparison.
She is a courageous woman and a survivor of indescribable horror, and yet has the hope and desire to go on proving man's insatiable will to live. A very good book for all to read...and remember.

Having read many documentaries about Auschwitz-Birkeneau is one thing....but reading it from someone who personally experienced it, provides a perspective that you could have never imagined.
Buy this book!

1st person account of a death camp. Very devastating. How could this happen? HOw could people allow this to happen? How could people do this to other HUMANS? Its a horrifying read and its real. Made me think alot about humanity itself. Shes a brave woman and god bless all those affected

It was facinating but so unreal! I just cannot fathom that these events could actually occur. My heart breaks for these people.

This is indeed a thorough memoir of a horrible time in history. Maybe because it was written so soon after the event, or maybe because the author was a doctor, is the reason for the detached way in which it comes across. Even when the emotion is there on the page, I did not feel the power in the words, as with Elie Wiesel or even Anne Frank. She presents the information and it's clear that she was miserable, suffering, barely surviving, but the words are not completely effective. Some Holocaust writers have a poetry of expression and can truly bring you into these awful situations they experienced. Five Chimneys is invaluable in the information it presents, but it never does more than that.

To be honest, I didn't realize that the author had been in Auschwitz-Birkenau for only (only is a terrible word in this situation) seven months. She talked of winters, summers, I had assumed she'd been there for at least a year or more. There is no consecutive timeline in this book, it jumps back and forth from month to month, I was never sure at what point in her captivity I was reading about. Still, it is a compelling read if only for the information provided.