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Letters to Sala: A Young Woman's Life in Nazi Labor Camps

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In Letters to Sala, a small yet interesting story of a young Jewish women from Sosnowiec, Poland, the real story of the Nazi slave-labor policy comes to light. Sala is arrested, separated from her family and spends the zenith of the war and the Holocaust confined to a forced-labor camp as a Zwangarbeiter or forced-laborer.

The camps in which she is confined and forced to work are within a chain of small labor colonies of the Schmelt Organization, a quasi-official camp set up under the tutelage of Albrecht Schmelt, a SS military man who is sponsored by Heinrich Himmler, to exploit the labor in the Zaglembie region of SW Poland (now south central Poland).

The interplay between the Schmelt Organization and the Nazi official policy of extermination of the Jews is critical for understanding the Holocaust. While the SS Economic Office wanted to exploit the forced-labor for the war effort, the SS Main Security Office (the Political office, which included the Gestapo), wanted to carry out the policy of extermination. This policy clash is on of the major reasons that young Sala survived the war and the Holocaust. The critical need for slave-labor postponed the implementation of extermination.

In the usual policy clash of economics versus politics, the economic considerations are paramount, especially during war time. Under the Nazi regime, the destruction of the European Jewry was paramount, despite the labor shortage. In other words, the irrational Nazi policy of extermination had the effect of liquidating a vital labor source absolutely necessary for the war effort even as the Soviet troops were advancing on Auschwitz and the immediate vicinity.

The life of Sala was spared only because the Schmelt Organization had unintentionally followed the more rational economic policy of exploitation of a valuable resource.