Olga married Gustav Aguire and moved to Havana, but returned to New York City in 1962 and founded the Memorial Library[1] in Manhattan.

The mission of the Memorial Library is to support Holocaust education and to help teachers from across the United States as well as other countries promote an agenda for social justice.

In 1944, Olga Lengyel worked as a surgical assistant in Cluj (original name Kolozsvár), the capital of Transylvania, at the clinic owned by her husband Miklós, a Berlin-educated surgeon.

Suddenly, the station was surrounded by soldiers and the Lengyel family and other hapless passengers were forced into crowded cattle cars.

Upon arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, young men, including Miklós, were selected for slave labor, while Olga's parents and children were sent "to the left", that is, directly to the gas chambers.

Over the next several weeks Olga's naiveté gave way to the sober realization that Auschwitz-Birkenau was an extermination camp, where internees were murdered in the gas chambers and burnt in the crematoria when they were judged sufficiently enfeebled to be no longer useful for slave labor.

The soup distributed at midday often could not be consumed without holding one's nose, while the six and a half ounces (180 g) of bread given each inmate in the evening contained a high proportion of sawdust.

When the gas chamber truck arrived, Olga strode away purposefully in the momentary confusion, carrying a stick (a symbol of authority at Auschwitz) she had found on the ground.

Three weeks after her arrival in Auschwitz, Olga was propositioned by a Polish prisoner, a carpenter who was working in the women's camp.

Olga's companions wrestled with this ethical dilemma and eventually decided to save the mothers by inducing stillbirths.

Olga worked on various commandos, including the "Esskommando" (food service kommando) and the "Scheisskommando" (latrine cleaning detail).

Both of these were preferable to senseless work requiring carrying stones, bricks or mud, then returning them to their original places.

As chief selector for new arrivals at Birkenau Station, Mengele was the top producer of victims for the gas chambers.

He would show up at the infirmary or the hospital at his whim, whistling operatic arias, and order women to the right or left indifferently.

Several Nazi doctors carried out scientific experiments at Auschwitz for the benefit of the Wehrmacht, such as seeing how long a man could survive in extreme conditions.

After she strong-armed the inmate surgeon at the infirmary into performing her illegal abortion, Irma disclosed that she planned a career in the movies after the war.

Olga felt that Irma's meticulous grooming, custom fitted clothes, and overuse of perfume were part of a deliberate act of sadism among the ragged women prisoners.

As a member of the infirmary staff, Olga had relatively unrestricted access to various areas of Auschwitz-Birkenau and was recruited by the underground organization of Auschwitz.

She even obtained extermination statistics from a French doctor attached to the Sonderkommando...1,314,000 gassed and cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May–July, 1944 (a staggering total for just three months).

During the first day of the March Olga counted 119 corpses, from previous columns, along the road in a 20-minute period and witnessed the execution of Dr. Rozsa, an elderly doctor who had fallen behind.

In this sense, Five Chimneys may be viewed as complementary to Primo Levi's If This Is a Man – Survival in Auschwitz[3] or Elie Wiesel's Night.

Allowing the families of arrested Jewish men to join them in transports to "work camps in Germany" (and to bring their valuables) was more effective (and lucrative) than a general roundup of Jews, which might have led to panic and resistance.

The naming of the Sonderkommando (special commando: the German word "kommando" meant "work group" and had nothing to do with the British Special Forces known as "commandos", and little to do with the Boer term "kommando" or "commando" used for a band of guerilla fighters in the Anglo-Boer War), whose job it was to burn the victims' corpses, and the designation of the cards of SchutzHäftlingen – protected prisoners marked for execution with the letters SB "Sonderbehandlung" – special treatment, was all part of the grand deception.

Criminals comprised a high percentage of camp functionaries, while university professors might be in the Scheisskommando (latrine cleaning detail).

The Germans enjoyed these paradoxes and capricious decisions and ever-changing rules (whose infraction would be punished savagely) may well have been part of a deliberate attempt to induce apathy and lessen the likelihood of resistance.

Five Chimneys is similar to Thanks to My Mother[6] by Schoschana Rabinovici, in the acute powers of observation and memory of the respective authors.

The physical examination (oral, rectal, vaginal, urethral) given to the nude women arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while German soldiers chuckled suggestively, is just one example.