By Chuck Martin
The Cincinnati Enquirer

If not for the persistence of Cara De Silva, the rest of the world may never have heard about the courageous women of Terezin. In 1994, as a reporter for Newsday in New York, De Silva wrote a story about a collection of recipes scribbled by starving prisoners in the concentration camp called Terezin during World War II.

Many of the recipes had been written and collected by a prisoner named Mina Pachter, who died in the camp but who had sent them to her daughter through a friend who survived Terezin. Eventually, Pachter's daughter, Anny, received the recipes in 1960, while she was living in New York.

So fascinated with the collection, De Silva enlisted the help of translator Bianca Steiner Brown, herself a Terezin survivor. The women worked on the project for nearly two years, and then 32 publishers turned the book down.

"Everyone was fascinated by it," says De Silva. "But they didn't know what to do with it. Was it a cookbook? They didn't understand it."

Finally, small publisher Jason Aronson Inc., agreed to publish the book in 1996. In Memory's Kitchen (Aronson; $25) has been hailed by The New York Times Book Review, other literary publications and Holocaust scholars.

De Silva will discuss the book during a a lecture Thursday at the University of Cincinnati. Her appearance is part of Holocaust Awareness Weeks 2003.

De Silva believes the women of Terezin may not have just recorded their favorite recipes as a means to remember home and family. It also may have been a way to fight back.

"When someone is trying to exterminate you and your culture, to write down the recipes is to give yourself a basis for psychological resistance," De Silva says. "It can give you the will to go on and a sense to be who you are."

De Silva has documented at least 15 other, similar recipe manuscripts compiled by prisoners of other Nazi concentration camps. She also has read about American prisoners, held by the Japanese during World War II, who pinned up clipped pictures of food in their cells.

"People don't fully understand how food nourishes not only the body but the spirit," De Silva says.

Pachter's original manuscript is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. De Silva, who teaches and edits books in New York, isn't planning to edit or write more books about the Holocaust.

"I wanted the voices of these women to be heard again," she says. "And I think I've accomplished that."