Chicken Soup for the Lonely Soul: Why Comfort Food Works

Scientific American:

My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly. Her father’s family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother’s family led simple lives. All that changed, though, when my grandmother was 13 years old. On the last day of Passover in 1944, my grandmother and her family were first deported by the Nazis. She was taken to the ghetto at Beregszas, in Hungary, along with her three sisters and her parents, Blanca and Moshe, where they remained housed in a brick factory, for about 6 weeks. Then, they were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was the last time that my grandmother saw her parents, and her two younger sisters, Agi and Vera.

She survived Auschwitz through some combination of luck and determination, only to end up being taken from work camp to work camp in Germany. After being liberated by the British Army on May 14, 1945, she spent most of that summer in a hospital.

Read the whole story: Scientific American