Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story - Softcover

Kirschner, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416541705 ISBN 13: 9781416541707

Publisher: Free Press, 2007

Synopsis

"Ann Kirschner allows her mother's poignant story to emerge from these heartbreaking missives, filling in the gaps with a dignified, quietly eloquent connecting narrative...an incredible journey through hell and back" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept hidden from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann, her daughter, and offer to answer any questions Ann wished to ask.

When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Germany, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty.

Sala's Gift is a heartbreaking, eye-opening story of survival and love amidst history's worst nightmare.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Kirschner is University Dean of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. She began her career as a lecturer in Victorian literature at Princeton University, where she had earned a Ph.D. in English. A writer and contributor to a variety of newspapers and other publications, she has built a career as an entrepreneur in media and technology. She lives with her family in New York City, a short drive from her mother's home.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Before She Was My Mother

My mother had a secret.

I knew that Sala Garncarz was born in Poland, the youngest of eleven children, and that she had survived a Nazi camp. I knew the names of my grandparents. I had one living aunt, but I didn't know anything about the rest of our once large family, not even their names.

In rare moments of retrospection, my mother would tell us about her arrival in the United States as the war bride of a handsome American soldier, ready to build a new life. I liked hearing her tale, especially since my brothers and I had starring roles. But even as a child, I was unconvinced. My mother was substituting a happy ending for an untold story. So fast, so complete a transformation from Sala, the survivor, to Sala, the happy American housewife and mother, seemed impossible. It was as if she had been snatched by extraterrestrials in 1939, and set down in New York in 1946.

Where did the old Sala go? What happened in the camp? Why didn't she have a number tattooed on her arm?

I had no one to ask. I never broached the subject with my brothers or my father. My mother's silence seemed to swallow up questions before they could be spoken aloud. When someone else -- a new friend, a careless relative -- wandered into the forbidden territory of Sala's years during the war, she turned her face away as if she had been slapped. Not all survivors refused to speak, I knew, and not all children were eager to listen. I had friends whose parents wouldn't stop talking about the past. Enough already, my friends would say, we're tired of playing Anne Frank.

I studied the faces in the old black-and-white photographs that stood like silent sentinels on her dresser. My favorite was a striking portrait of young Sala in profile, gazing intently at an older woman: "My friend Ala Gertner," my mother told me. She offered no details. Where did they meet? What happened to Ala Gertner? Sala, with her thick, glossy hair pulled back from her face and cascading down her back, her sharp cheekbones catching the light, looked like an irresistible ingÉnue from my favorite old movies with Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Moira Shearer, Irene Dunne. Ala was not nearly as pretty, but there was something bold and sophisticated in the tilt of her hat and something hypnotic in the way her eyes locked with my mother's.

Of course, despite her best efforts, Sala could never build an impermeable wall between our present and her past. The fog seeped in. During the televised trials of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she sat and watched for hours, chain smoking, stony and silent. She read every Holocaust book, watched every Holocaust movie, observed every Holocaust anniversary, but silently, privately, as if I wasn't watching.

I thought she might yield when I became a mother. Let's give it a try, I decided, when my children were old enough to ask questions. My daughter was preparing a school project on family history and wanted to interview both of her grandparents. The setting was auspicious: we sat comfortably in my parents' living room, the dishes washed and put away, the sofa cushions straightened, the toys back in the closet. My father was entirely cooperative, his memories of New York in the '30s charming and evocative. When it was Sala's turn, she began to fidget, to squirm, unable to find a comfortable position. She threw out a few innocuous anecdotes, about the rag doll that was her only toy, about her circle of friends, their school uniforms. I had heard these all before. But then her discomfort became acute; her always troublesome arthritis and back pain interrupted her, she had to stand up, she had to walk around, and the tentative, sputtering flow of memory dribbled to a halt. She kept her secrets.

All that ended in 1991 on a day that would change her forever in my eyes, a day that was to change my life as well.

Sala was about to be admitted into the hospital and she was spending her last weekend with my family. New symptoms had become acute while she was traveling in Israel. Suddenly, the hills of Jerusalem were too steep for her to climb. She returned to New York and learned that she needed triple-bypass surgery.

She was sixty-seven years old, miserable in her first week of giving up smoking, and her hands looked empty without her usual cigarette. I could tell that she was getting ready to say goodbye. It was a beautiful summer day, we had just finished lunch, and I was sitting alone. She came outside to join me. In her hands, I saw a red cardboard box that had once contained my old "Spill and Spell" game.

She held it out to me and said, "You should have this."

Her jewelry, I thought.

Instead, I found within the box a small, worn brown leather portfolio about the size of a paperback book. Within the portfolio were hundreds of letters, postcards, and scraps of papers, some written in barely legible, tiny, cramped handwriting, others in beautiful italic script, some dashed off in blunt pencil scrawls on scraps of ragged paper, all neatly tucked away. "These are my letters from camp," she said. She spread them before me. Postcards and letters and photographs covered the table, the smell of old paper escaping into the summer air.

"What do you want to know?" my mother said.

And so I began to ask.

Questions spilled out randomly. Where had she been? Who had written the letters? How had she managed to save them? Where were these people now? My mother answered as best she could, her voice wound tightly around names and places long unspoken.

She was soon tired. Together, we returned the letters to the box that had held them for so long -- but now the box was mine.

My mother's letters didn't just fill in a blank spot on the map of her past. They brought her to life -- my mother as a young girl -- and they also led our family out of the shadows, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were killed during the war.

The letters were written by more than eighty different people. They told the story of a family, a city, and an elaborate system of slavery organized by government and embraced by businesses. Only the first few postcards were written in Polish; the rest of the correspondence was in German, with a sprinkling in Czech and Yiddish. Some markings seemed obvious, like the "Z" stamp that indicated review by a censor (zensiert in German), but others took more study to yield their secrets. There were dozens of charming hand-drawn birthday cards, some with poems and quaint printed illustrations of flowers and children. I commissioned English translations. I was impatient; the arrival of each translation was as thrilling as if the letters had been written yesterday, and to me. I found letters from Ala Gertner, whose writing proved to be as distinctive as her photograph. There were love letters that had been smuggled to my mother by a suitor named Harry, whose existence had been entirely unknown to me. My Aunt Rose, still living in Brooklyn, became a different person. The faded photographs on my mother's dresser began to come alive.

My mother and I read the letters together. She needed the English versions almost as much as I did; at the end of the war, she had spoken and written German fluently, and had also added a smattering of Russian, and a bit of Czech to her two native languages, Polish and Yiddish. But she put away those languages in 1946. Her command of Polish and German had been extinguished to the point where she read only with great difficulty, her rusty translation skills clogged by emotions. As she pronounced the strange syllables in her familiar voice, it seemed like an odd trick of impersonation.

We talked and talked. She tolerated my questions and my tape recorder, offering up revelation after revelation as if the prohibition against sharing her memories had never existed. She was telling these stories for the first time and I was an eager listener.

What I had always imagined as my mother's relatively brief ordeal as a prisoner in one Nazi camp turned out to be almost five years in seven different labor camps.* She was one of about fifty thousand slaves, young and healthy Jewish men and women from western Poland. They were the valuable property of Organization Schmelt, an SS division that was set up soon after the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Hundreds of labor camps were created in the early years of the war, usually attached to construction projects or factories that belonged to German businesses. Conditions varied, but in Sala's camps, they wore whatever clothes they had brought from home. Unlike the prisoners of Auschwitz, these men and women were not tattooed with numbers. These Jews were meant to survive, at least to finish the day's work. They had been torn from their loved ones, they were hungry, they worked impossible hours under unimaginable conditions, they slept in overcrowded wooden barracks without heat or ventilation, and they lived in constant terror -- but the Nazis delivered their mail. Letters and packages were allowed, even encouraged, as if they were not prisoners but first-time campers away from home and the Nazis were eager to reassure anxious parents that all was well. By the summer of 1943, however, all the regular mail stopped.

Organization Schmelt is a minor footnote in history. Relatively little has been written about the partnership between Nazi bureaucrats, Jewish leaders, and German businessmen that spirited away tens of thousands of people from the Eastern Upper Silesian region of Poland. Few books even mention Albrecht Schmelt, the chief architect who lent his thick slap of a name to a rapidly expanding slave trade that made him a rich man. The very existence of labor camps where Jews received mail is hardly known, and their locations are all but forgotten -- except by those who were imprisoned there. This is not surprising: to write about these places, which were constructed on the outer circles of hell, not its very core, might have appeared to compromise the agonizing reality of Auschwitz. In the Schmelt camps, there were no gas chambers, no crematoria, and no legions of spectral Musselmen, the walk...

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1416541705
• ISBN 13: 9781416541707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320