ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

Zahava Szász Stessel (* 1930 in Abaújszántó as Zahava Szász) is a Holocaust survivor and Hungarian-American author.

Live life

Zahavicsku Szász grew up in a wine-growing community of Tokaj-Hegyalja. On 16 April 1944, her family was deported by the Eichmann Commando and his Hungarian helpers only to Kassa and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here the family was separated and all family members except her and her sister born in 1931 were murdered.

The sisters came to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and from there to the Markkleeberg concentration camp, a women’s subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp. She and her sister had pretended to be older, because as children they would have been murdered immediately. In Markkleeberg between August 1944 and April 1945, some 1,300 Hungarian Jews and 250 French resistance fighters were held prisoner and forced to work in the armaments industry for the Junkers aircraft and engine plants. On April 13, 1945, the prisoners were sent on a death march, which the two sisters survived.

After the end of the war, they first returned to Hungary. Since no family member was alive anymore, they came to Bavaria to the children's camp for displaced persons in the monastery of Indersdorf, from where they drove to Sète in southern France in January 1947. Their illegal immigration to Palestine initially failed, as they were prevented from landing and interned by the British in Cyprus.

In Israel she married and took the name Zahava Szász Stessel. In 1957 she emigrated with her husband to the USA. Szász Stessel worked after studying in a city library in New York City. She graduated at 61. She published research on the history of Hungarian Jews.

In her book Snow Flowers, Snowflowers. Survival in the Buchenwald subcamp Markkleeberg describes the exhausting forced labor, the humiliation and the everyday life in the camp under SS guard and at the same time tells how even here humanity and solidarity could not be completely eradicated.

Szász Stessel was awarded honorary citizenship of the city on 16 April 2008 on the occasion of her visit to Markkleeberg.

Writings
Zahava Szász armchair: snowflowers. Survival in the Buchenwald subcamp Markkleeberg. Published by Notenspur Leipzig e.V., Verlag Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin Leipzig 2021. ISBN 978-3-95565-445-0
Zahava Szász chairs: Snow flowers. Hungarian Jewish Women in an Airplane Factory, Markkleeberg, Germany. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, Madison, NJ 2009. (books.google.de, excerpt)
Wine and thorns in Tokay Valley : Jewish life in Hungary : the history of Abaújszántó. Madison, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1995
Jewish life in Hungary : the history of Abaújszántó. Thesis (Ph.D.), New York University, 1991.

Literature
Howard Lupovitch: Wine and Thorns in the Tokay Valley: Jewis