Bonny Reichert always wanted to tell her dad's Holocaust story. She finally found her way in through food

When Toronto-based journalist Bonny Reichert turned 40, she quit her job and enrolled in culinary school — a life-changing decision that pushed her to explore her relationship with food in writing. 

This exploration, along with a critical bowl of borscht in Warsaw, led Reichert to writing her memoir, How to Share an Egg, which dives into how food shapes her history as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 

"I've always known about my dad's incredible life, his early experience of brutality and hardship and survival," wrote Reichert in an email to CBC Books. 

"I've always wanted to tell his story. But for years — for decades — I couldn't find my way in. I just didn't know how to write about him while still honouring my own experience of being his daughter."

• The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize is currently accepting submissions

After visiting Berlin and Poland in 2016, she finally found her angle: a memoir that explores her father's survival while following her own journey finding herself. 

"Once I had that vision, I couldn't write fast enough. I needed my dad's input and he was eighty-nine years old when I began. There was no time to waste."

Through food, How to Share an Egg recounts Reichert's childhood in the restaurant industry, the end of her first marriage, experiences with motherhood and her visit to Poland, while weaving in her father's story of survival. 

How to Share an Egg is Reichert's first book and it will be released on Jan. 21, 2025. You can read an excerpt below. 

Imagine two boys — a couple of skeletons, really — roaming the German countryside. It's spring, 1945, and they haven't eaten much besides potato peels and coffee grounds for three years. They knock on door after door until they find a farmer who goes into his kitchen and brings something back: a single brown egg. One egg for two starving boys.

The day before, my dad and his cousin were hiding in a hayloft. The boys could hear planes through the barn's patchy roof; they didn't know it, but the gates of concentration camps throughout Europe had already been pried open. The soldiers guarding my dad's dwindling cohort were running — running from the Russians and the Americans, running from their own certain capture — and they were taking their prisoners with them. The SS didn't want Jews relaying what had happened to them, and the German war machine counted on slave labour to the bitter end. Dad's march had begun at Gleiwitz, an Auschwitz subcamp, where he'd been forced to carry steel railway ties with his emaciated shoulders and bare hands.

One egg for two starving boys.

Each night, the soldiers commandeered a farm before hurrying off in the morning, dragging along any prisoners who were still alive. Usually they slept in open fields, but that night, Dad and his cousin had slipped into a barn, climbed to the hayloft, and brought up the ladder behind them.

"Raus, raus," the soldiers called in the morning, the standard come-out-before-I-shoot-you greeting. Dad didn't move. The soldiers came into the barn with pitchforks, tearing at the ground below the hayloft, but the boys stayed hidden.

It might have been the next morning when new voices called to them. "Raus! We want to help you!" After years of abuse and terror, the boys were not convinced. Only when the voices switched to English did Dad and his cousin emerge to find a jeep with a white star. Standing in the field were not the SS but American soldiers. What does my father remember about this moment of liberation, eighty years ago? What he ate, of course. "I was so hungry, but the only food they had was a big jar of green relish," he says. "I ate and ate until I was sick."

When you have a father with stories like these, and you happen to be a writer, you know what you're supposed to do. I was always going to write Dad's incredible story. Capturing the tale of survival for future generations was not only my privilege, but my duty. And yet, there was always a reason to put it off. "When are we going to start the book?" he'd ask.

"Soon, Dad. Soon."

Capturing the tale of survival for future generations was not only my privilege, but my duty.

My dad is a charming and persuasive man. He's a force, an optimist, a lover of life. He's not someone you want to disappoint, and I had every intention of fulfilling my role. I just couldn't find the right time. First, I was too young. Then I was busy with university. Soon I was overwhelmed at work. The years pressed down on us. Dad was sixty; he was seventy-five. 

A few times, Dad and I sat down together. I knew most of what had happened to him, but I didn't have all the facts I would need for a book. My pen shook in my hand. He would have told me anything, but there were certain words and sentences I couldn't stand to hear him say.

He would have told me anything, but there were certain words and sentences I couldn't stand to hear him say.

The boy from the hayloft is now ninety-three. I've waited until the last possible moment, but still, this is not quite the book I was supposed to write. Instead of a straightforward tale of Holocaust survival, it traces a more subtle struggle. It's not always a life-and-death struggle. It's not necessarily a unique struggle. It's simply the story of a daughter trying to figure out who she is in the shadow of something bigger. 

And because it's our family, it's also a book about food — sumptuous meals and meals of almost nothing at all; food that is both simple and complicated, food that is rife with meaning. As much about survival as sustenance, it's the story of a family that lost everything and built itself up again, one meal at a time.

Excerpted from How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert. Copyright © 2025 Bonny Reichert. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.