Ilona Karmel (1925 – 2000) was an American writer of Polish Jewish origins who survived three Nazi concentration camps, moving after World War II to the US.

She wrote two books, of which An Estate of Memory was considered one of the most important descriptions of the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust.

After living at several addresses, they were moved with their mother in 1942 to the Kraków Ghetto, which was used as staging post for Jews to be transported to concentration camps.

Right at the end of the war she had been hit by a German tank, and suffered severe injuries to her legs in an accident that killed her mother.

In 1947, the sisters jointly issued a collection of poems Śpiew za drutami (Song Behind the Wire), which they had secretly written in the camps.

Within four years of arriving in the US she had been awarded a BA in English (Phi Beta Kappa), had written the first draft of her novel Stephania, and had won the 1950 Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest for her story, Fru Holm.

[1][2][3][4] Karmel married Hans Zucker, a scientist of Austrian descent who had emigrated in 1938, and the couple lived in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Although The New York Times said that "like Solzhenitsyn, Ilona Karmel has succeeded in writing about life in the prison camps" as "plausible, possible human experience", early reviews of An Estate of Memory were varied.