Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Eugene Ginter shared this recipe and story in "Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors." It is reprinted here with permission of the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Foundation.

“I will share with you a recipe for a chocolate sandwich that my mother made for me right after the war when we lived in Germany. She used this recipe to fatten me up. My mother used to say, “I’d rather spend the money on the butcher than the doctor.” After the war, things were tight. I had pictures of me where the biggest object on my face was my ears. I looked like Dumbo with the ears. I was so skinny, very emaciated. I had these gigantic ears and a small face, and I didn’t like food. If I saw a lot of food, I would throw up, I guess from the hunger… When my mother found me after the war, she tried certain things. I would only eat certain things. I liked chocolate. Who doesn’t? She would take a slice of black bread, put a lot of butter on it, then take hard chocolate and shave it down and pat it into the butter. She was trying to fatten me up. So, I would bite into this thing. How bad can black bread be with butter and chocolate?”

Read more about Eugene’s story in “The Boy Liberated from Auschwitz Just Before His Sixth Birthday” and explore more recipes from Holocaust survivors in "Recipes from the Kitchens of Holocaust Survivors".