Irene Zisblatt

Zisblatt was one of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors whose story was featured in the 1998 Academy Award-winning documentary movie, The Last Days, directed by James Moll and produced by Steven Spielberg. The documentary follows Zisblatt as she and her daughter travel back to sites of memory, including Zisblatt's childhood town, which she had not seen since her deportation in 1944. Zisblatt also visited the ghetto she was formerly placed in, before she was deported to Auschwitz. Experimental psychologist George Mastroianni, in his Times of Israel Blogs piece discussing The Last Days and a 2010 blog piece by independent scholar Joachim Neander, stated "Neander analyzed Zisblatt's testimony and raised concerns about the factual accuracy of some of the elements of her story."

Zisblatt now lives in Broward County Florida. She has a son Mark (b. 1957), a daughter, Robin (b. 1963), and five grandchildren. She frequently makes visits to American schools to talk about her personal Holocaust experiences.

On the second night of Passover, 8 April 1944, she and her family were sent to the Munkács ghetto, which, according to Zisblatt, consisted of a former brick factory surrounded by a fence. All houses were already full, so her family built a small tent from the tablecloths they had in their suitcases, and that's where they slept.

Irene Zisblatt (née Zegelstein; born 1929) is a Carpathian Mountains-born American Holocaust survivor. She was an inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She appeared in the 1998 documentary The Last Days and published her autobiography The Fifth Diamond in 2008.

Irene Zegelstein was born on 28 December 1929, in the resort town of Polyana, in what is now Zakarpattia Oblast in Ukraine, in a house with no electricity. Her father was a co-owner of a spa, and her mother was a housewife. Around 1939, at the age of nine, she was expelled from school, since Jewish people were forbidden to leave their houses after six in the evening or before eight in the morning.