Imaginary Feasts

Anne Georget, Imaginary Feasts, video still, 2014

Recipes that survived concentration camps 

Edited by journalist Cara De Silva, In Memory’s Kitchen is one of the most inspiring examples of struggle for survival and memory in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The book comprises recipes penned by Mina Pächter, who was deported to a Czechoslovakian ghetto/concentration camp of Terezín (also known as Theresienstadt) in 1942 and wrote them down there under starvation. Before she died in 1944, Pächter’s final wish was to preserve these recipes – which she made into a book by binding them together with her own hands⁠ – and to have them sent to her daughter in Palestine. However, this delicate manuscript made its way to her daughter, Anne Stern only 25 years after Pächter’s death ⁠and was published in 1996. Similarly, the documentary, Festin Imaginaires (Imaginary Feasts) by Anne Georget discovers that not only in the Nazi concentration camps but in every death camp, including the Gulag camps and the ones in Japan and Czechoslovakia, people who struggled for life organised imaginary dinners, and hoped to hand down their recipes to their relatives in writing. The film treats food as a symbol of holding on to life with a faith for a better world.