Survival
“The families they’ve built and cook for
are their triumph over hardship and evil.”
Irris completely embraced the feasting
that came as part of compiling the book.
“You just can’t say no to a second or
third piece of cake from a Holocaust
survivor who bakes for you and you
can’t say no to a Jewish grandmother.”
Many of the 20 grandmothers and two
grandfathers she interviewed for the book
had never spoken of the unimaginable
horror they had endured, not even to
their husbands or wives. They wanted to
protect their children. For most of them
it would take 40 or 50 years before they
started talking about it, and when they
did it was to their grandchildren.
There was no counselling for surviving
mass murder. Seeing the face of evil up
close sets you apart from other people.
“Australia was optimistic,” Irris says.
“A chance for a new beginning. They
were closing the old chapter and
committing to a new life. They locked
those terrible memories away until they
couldn’t lock them away anymore.”
Baba Schwartz, who was known for
the yeast cakes of her childhood in
eastern Hungary, survived death marches
and said the experience “fossilised” into
her. “It became a big, big stone inside
me,” she said. She died last year.
Now in her nineties, Sarah Saaroni
swims, grows and pickles her own
vegetables and makes the jam recipes in
the book. At the age of 14 her parents
used her “non Jewish” looks to obtain
false papers and she joined a Polish work
battalion in Germany, working 12-hour
days in a cannery. When her cover was
blown she became a lone teenager on
the run in Nazi Germany, surviving the
bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and
interrogation by the Gestapo. She ended
the war working as a nurse at the Russian
front as it advanced. Forty years later she
started having nightmares, waking up
drenched in sweat, heart pounding. It
wasn’t until she wrote it all down that
she was able to sleep through the night.
Lena Goldstein turned 100 last
February surrounded by admiring family
and friends. She waited until she was 40to have her two sons. “She was scared
that if she loved someone she would
have to lose them,” says Irris.
When she had a chance to escape the
Warsaw ghetto, it was her brother who
told her to go.
“My brother said that somebody has to
survive to tell the world what’s happening
here because no one will believe it. He
was right, it was unbelievable.”
Lena spent the last six months of the
war crouched underground with nine
other people in a narrow water channel
deep beneath Warsaw, without changing
her clothes. When they came out it took
two weeks to be able to stand up straight.
Irris had been very close to her own
grandmother, whose kitchen had been
the centre of family life. When her
grandmother died suddenly she realised
none of her recipes had been written
down. “My mourning for her became
focused on trying to recreate her honey
cake in an attempt to preserve her
memory which was somehow that
taste: dark, fragrant and spicy, a little
like gingerbread, but more moist. I kept
baking but I didn’t succeed. I knew the
importance of food and memory.”ForIrrisMaklerthisproject
about love became the
antidote to the violence she
sees as a correspondent in
the Middle East. For the past
10 years she has lived in
Jerusalem with her Israeli
partner and their dogs. Irris
was a lawyer but began her
journalistic career on the BBC’s
Panorama when a lawyer was
needed for a story. Returning to
Sydney she was a founder of
the ABC’s Australian Story. She
was one of the first journalists
into Afghanistan after 9/11.
In the chaos of war she has
sought women who suffer
because of male aggression.
“I speak to women, find out
how they cope and what the
difficulties are. It’s women
who are the great survivors.”
In the past four years, between
assignments to cover war
stories, and as a respite to the
“hatred, aggression and
violence” of Jerusalem, Irris has
been cooking and so have her
friends. Five kitchens around
the world were redolent with
the fragrance of chocolate,
sour cherry and walnut cake,
the comforting aroma of roast
duck with red cabbage and
warming beef goulash, as
they tested the recipes, but
in healthy modern versions.
“Grandmothers don’t mean to
lie but they’re so adept they
can’t tell you quantities or times,
they cook from memory. I had
seen them do it and written it
down but I’d get home and I
couldn’t exactly do it perfectly
myself, so we had to practise.”
Irris’ story
Clockwise from top left: Lena Goldstein and
Irris Mackler; Baba Schwartz; Sarah Saaroni;
twins Annetta Able and Stephanie Heller.