“I jotted it down on a scrap paper found in trash cans in the factory - taken, stolen. They were pieces covered in pencilled recordings of German workers’ wages, but I overlooked the words underneath. I wrote the ingredients down, hardly able to grip the stump of a pencil, the recipes of nameless women …”

— The creation of Elisabeth’s Recipe Book. Written & Created clandestinely in 1944 while imprisoned in a Nazi Labour Camp. A recipe book with 80 pages of hundreds of womens recipes.

“It is Easter Sunday, April 1945, early in the morning, maybe just dawn. We stand still, like frozen grey statues. Us. Seven hundred and thirty women, wrapped in wet threadbare blankets, standing in the rain. Our blankets hang over our heads, drape down to the soil. We hold them, closed with our hands from inside, leaving only a small opening to peer out, so that we save the precious warmth of our breath

— Elisabeth Raab from her memoir And Peace Never Came

So begins Elisabeth’s sojourn, her search for freedom that begins with the chaotic barness in which she finds herself after liberation in April 1945, and takes her across several continents and half a lifetime. Raab paints a brief yet moving picture of her idyllic before her imprisonment in Auschwitz, but it is in the images of life after liberation that Elisabeth imparts her story- a story of the brutal, and, at time, the beautiful facts of human nature.