Olga Lengyel (edit name/settings)

Olga Lengyel (October 19, 1908–April 15, 2001) was a Hungarian woman who became a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and later wrote about her experiences in her book Five Chimneys.

Olga Lengyel was a trained surgical assistant in Cluj, Romania, working in the hospital in which her husband, Dr. Miklos Lengyel, was director. She was deported with her husband, parents and children to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, south-west Poland, in the spring of 1944. She was the only member of the family to survive. She wrote about her experiences in the Holocaust in her autobiography, 'Five Chimneys', first published in 1947. After the war, she emigrated to the United States. According to the website of the Memorial Library, Olga founded the Memorial Library, located at 58 East 79th Street, which was chartered by the University of the State of New York. Olga died in 2001 at the age of 93 having battled and survived three separate bouts of cancer.

In 2006 the Memorial Library began the Holocaust Educator Network, a national program for teachers interested in and committed to Holocaust education, especially in rural schools and small towns, in a partnership with the National Writing Project's Rural Sites Network. The program is directed by Dr. Sondra Perl, author of On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate.