Four Scraps of Bread

By Magda Hollander-Lafon

Born in Hungary in 1927, Magda Hollander-Lafon was among the 437,000 Jews deported from Hungary between May and July 1944. Magda, her mother, and her younger sister survived a three-day deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau; there, she was considered fit for work and so spared, while her mother and sister were sent straight to their deaths.

Hollander-Lafon recalls an experience she had in Birkenau: “A dying woman gestured to me: as she opened her hand to reveal four scraps of moldy bread, she said to me in a barely audible voice, ‘Take it. You are young. You must live to be a witness to what is happening here. You must tell people so that this never happens again in the world.’ I took those four scraps of bread and ate them in front of her. In her look I read both kindness and release. I was very young and did not understand what this act meant, or the responsibility that it represented.”

Years later, the memory of that woman’s act came to the fore, and Magda Hollander-Lafon could be silent no longer. In her words, she wrote her book not to obey the duty of remembering but in loyalty to the memory of those women and men who disappeared before her eyes. Her story is not a simple memoir or chronology of events. Instead, through a series of short chapters, she invites us to reflect on what she has endured. Often centered on one person or place, the scenes of brutality and horror she describes are intermixed with reflections of a more meditative cast. Four Scraps of Bread is both historical and deeply evocative, melancholic, and at times poetic in nature.

Following the text is a “Historical Note” with a chronology of the author's life that complements her kaleidoscopic style. After liberation and a period in transit camps, she arrived in Belgium, where she remained. Eventually, she chose to be baptized a Christian and pursued a career as a child psychologist.

The author records a journey through extreme suffering and loss that led to radiant personal growth and a life of meaning. As she states: "Today I do not feel like a victim of the Holocaust but a witness reconciled with myself.” Her ability to confront her experiences and free herself from her trauma allowed her to embrace a life of hope and peace. Her account is, finally, an exhortation to us all to discover life-giving joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780268101251

Magda Hollander-Lafon

For many years, Magda Hollander-Lafon has shared her experiences with thousands of high-school students. First published in French in 2012 as Quatre petits bouts de pain, Hollander-Lafon’s book has won two prestigious literary awards in France, including the 2012 Panorama-La Procure prize for books on spirituality. It has been translated into six languages and now into English.

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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Magda Hollander-Lafon was born in Hungary on June 15, 1927 near the border with Slovakia. Her family was Jewish but not practicing. Nevertheless as a result of the racial laws introduced in Hungary between 1938 and 1941, her father was taken away for forced labor, and eventually Magda herself was denied schooling.

Together with her mother and sister, she was among the 437,403 Jews deported from Hungary between May and July 1944. After a three-day journey in a crowded cattle wagon she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was immediately separated from her family. Because she claimed to be eighteen when in fact she was only sixteen, she was considered fit for work and thus avoided being sent straight to her death. Her mother and sister were not so lucky.

It was in Auschwitz-Birkenau that a dying woman gave Magda four scraps of bread, telling her: Take it. You are young, you must live to be a witness to what is happening here. You must tell others so that this never happens again in the world.

This act of generosity would provide both the inspiration and the title for this, her best-known book. Hollander-Lafon remained silent about her wartime experience until 1977, when she published Les chemins du temps (The Paths of Time). In this early work she directly addressed the horrors she had witnessed as a deportee as well as her recovery and attempt to resume a normal life after the Liberation. But a now-notorious interview with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner for Jewish affairs in the collaborationist Vichy regime, published in a popular French magazine in 1978, reignited her irrepressible sense of duty toward the memory of Jews killed in the Holocaust. This led her to write a prolongation of her earlier text, subtitled Des ténèbres à la joie (From Darkness to Joy). Both works were combined and published as Quatre petits bouts de pain (Four Scraps of Bread) in 2012 to significant acclaim, including winning the Panorama-La Procure prize for books on spirituality.

Hollander-Lafon’s story is not a simple memoir or narrative, nor does it follow a straightforward chronology of events. Instead through a series of very short chapters, many no more than one or two pages, she invites us to participate in a reflection on what she has gone through. Often the subject is very specific, naming a person or a place, and the chapter is full of naked, brutal description. Other times the subject is more ethereal, the elements vague or anonymous, and external details give way to an inward focus. Meditation, poetry, a kaleidoscope of fragments—all of these have been used to describe the path along which Hollander-Lafon leads us in Four Scraps of Bread.

The journey through extreme suffering and loss to rebirth and radiant personal growth is of course a recognizable spiritual archetype. However, although at times she uses an explicitly religious language, more often Hollander-Lafon remains grounded in the description of her own lived experience and whatever meaning she believes it has. For example, she attributes her survival at Auschwitz-Birkenau to a combination of intuition—recognizing, for example, when the physical condition of those around her indicated that they were most likely the next to be killed, and immediately moving away to join a different row of prisoners—and the fact that, due to the sheer volume of Hungarian Jews arriving in a short period of time, quite a number slipped through the net without being tattooed or registered. She does not lean on a post hoc spiritualization of her experience, a reassuring faith that throughout it the Almighty was sparing her for some special mission. Indeed she never denies the immense role that chance and opportunity appeared to play in her life at that time. If it was a blessing for her to survive, it is also a responsibility: to tend to the memory of those who did not survive, but also to seek meaning from what she herself has gone through.

Several words, expressions, and themes recur in Hollander-Lafon’s writing. For example, although she describes only a few faces in detail, she frequently speaks of the look on people’s faces—the real, ineffable, living expression of human emotion, as opposed to the depiction of a person’s features. Hollander-Lafon believes that the look on a person’s face has immense power and can be the precious bridge from death to life; hence her desperation to find a smile on the face of a stranger after the war ended. Another important set of images is related to working with nature, such as the idea of digging into or tilling the metaphoric soil of her identity and her memories. This notion of tending to the soil of her innermost being suggests a patient but active engagement with the specific circumstances of her personal history. The uniqueness, the reality, and the responsibility of each person is a core principle in Hollander-Lafon’s writing and in her life. By sharing her path to wholeness with us, she invites us to start our journey from where we are.

THE PATHS OF TIME

LOOKS

My memory opens up, painfully, at the sound of persistent calls. I am emerging from the long tunnel where I have lain low.

Thousands of faces disappeared

Without knowing why. They call out to me

They are full of distress

Humiliation

Blazing with hunger

Snuffed out by thirst.

The tense look of a friend whose flesh bore the marks of a dog’s bite

With each step she was losing her life.

The overwhelmed look of another woman beaten to death.

Hundreds of fading looks, exhausted from long hours of roll calls.

On thousands of lost faces, the dejection of a life terminated too soon.

Trucks