Irene Zisblatt

Irene Zisblatt / Irene Zegelstein (F / Hungary, 1929), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz>

• MEMOIRS : The Last Days (doc, 1998) -- The Fifth Diamond (2008)

Biography

• wiki.en -- [wiki.it]

Irene Zegelstein was born December 28, 1929 in Polena, Slovakia. Her father was a business owner, and her mother was a housewife. Around 1939, at the age of nine, she was expelled from school.

On March 19, 1944, she and her family were sent to the Miskolc ghetto. Two months later, she and her family were sent on a train to Auschwitz. She was immediately separated from her family and she was the only one of her 40 family members to survive the gas chambers.

With the help of another prisoner, she was able to escape Auschwitz by getting on a train traveling across tracks running near the No. 3 gas chamber. The train took her to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany where shortly after she was forced to go on a "death march" as the war wound down. After marching for days upon days Zisblatt escaped during a dark night and was found by American soldiers.

After the war, she was adopted to an American family.

Zisblatt was one of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors whose story was featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary movie, The Last Days (1998).

Doc : The Last Days (doc, 1998)

The Last Days is a documentary, directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor and Kenneth Lipper in 1998. Steven Spielberg was one of the executive producers, in his role as founder of the Shoah Foundation. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Shoah. Shoah survivors Bill Basch, Irene Zisblatt, Renee Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Tom Lantos, Dario Gabbai and Randolph Braham are featured in the film.

The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Book : The Fifth Diamond (1998)

"As a young girl in Hungary, Irene Weisberg Zisblatt was taken by the Nazis and became a prisoner in the dehumanizing Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She witnessed and experienced unspeakable cruelty, lost her entire family to the gas chambers, and became one of Josef Mengele’s “guinea pigs”. Somehow she survived, through her hope and faith and the strength drawn from her unshakeable bond with her best friend, Sabka. The Fifth Diamond: The Story of Irene Weisberg Zisblatt is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. It took Irene fifty years to break free of the terror of her experience and speak about it for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and in Stephen Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary, “The Last Days.” Now, in this new biography written with Gail Ann Webb, Irene continues her quest to educate children, in order to rid the world of prejudice, intolerance, and indifference."--Publisher description.