Four Scraps of Bread by Anthony T.; Magda; Fuller Hollander-Lafon

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 shedirectly 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 descriptionof 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