Education, Remembrance, Youth

Cookbook for Survival

About this project

The "Cookbook for Survival" is a joint project of Golem Theater and the Haver Foundation. It brings high school students the life story of Aunt Hédi, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, in the form of a theater play and a classroom activity based on it. Golem Theater used the life interview published under the same title by Centropa in 2013 to create this extraordinary play. It introduces Aunt Hédi's life before the war, the concentration camp of Lichtenwörth, where she wrote a cookbook with her friends, and then the decades that followed the war until the political regime changed. After the play, Haver volunteers help the students reflect on and process its content.

Why is it important?

School education based on factual knowledge often misses the tangible, personal dimension that could turn abstract historical events into comprehensible real events. A truly worrying manifestation of this approach is when students say they have heard way too much about the Holocaust while their knowledge about it is rather limited. The "Cookbook for Survival" shows how certain historical periods and events impacted people's everyday life and also encourages students to find similarities not only in the past but in their own present too.

Why is it special?

The project is unique in its complex, two-pronged method as it approaches high school students. On the one hand, the theater play provides them with an intensive artistic experience affecting them emotionally, through which they can put themselves in the shoes of a distant yet real person. On the other hand, the follow-up workshop, with the tools of non-formal education, helps them process the experience and related emotions intellectually. Students can consider how their own life and identity are shaped by their environment and all those circumstances that once will be called 'history'.