Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story [Hardcover]

Ann Kirschner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2006

"Do you know why I write so much? Because as long as you read, we are together."

-- Raizel Garncarz (Sala's sister),

April 24, 1941

Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. But then, few families have a mother and a daughter quite like Sala and Ann Kirschner. For nearly fifty years, Sala 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 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 and offer to answer any questions her daughter wished to ask. It was a life-changing moment for her scholar, writer, and entrepreneur daughter.

We know surprisingly little about the vast network of Nazi labor camps, where imprisoned Jews built railroads and highways, churned out munitions and materiel, and otherwise supported the limitless needs of the Nazi war machine. This book gives us an insider's account: Conditions were brutal. Death rates were high. As the war dragged on and the Nazis retreated, inmates were force-marched across hundreds of miles, or packed into cattle cars for grim journeys from one camp to another. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Poland, 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. In the first years of the conflict, Sala was aided by her close friend Ala Gertner, who would later lead an uprising at Auschwitz and be executed just weeks before the liberation of that camp. Sala was also helped by other key friends. Yet above all, she survived thanks to the slender threads of support expressed in the letters of her friends and family. She kept them at great personal risk, and it is astonishing that she was able to receive as many as she did. With their heartwrenching expressions of longing, love, and hope, they offer a testament to the human spirit, an indomitable impulse even in the face of monstrosity.

Sala's Gift is a rare book, a gift from Ann to her mother, and a great gift from both women to the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This moving account illuminates a little-known aspect of the Holocaust: Organization Schmelt, in which Jewish leaders supplied slave labor to the Germans for the war effort. In 1940, 16-year-old Sala Garncarz, a young Polish Jew (and the author's mother), went to work in a Schmelt labor camp in place of her frail older sister, Raizel, who had been ordered there for six weeks by the local Jewish Council. But six weeks stretched into five years. Sala worked at seven German, Polish and Czech camps until she was liberated by Russian soldiers. In 1999 Sala shared with the author the box of letters that she had written and received during this period . Sala survived by her wits and the protection of Ala Gertner, an older woman who was later hanged for participating in an uprising at Auschwitz. Sala's correspondence with Ala after the latter left the work camp, and the letters she exchanged with Raizel and other family members and friends are heartrending testimony to the extreme suffering of Polish Jews. After the war, Sala married an American soldier and immigrated to the U.S. Kirschner, president of a management consulting company, has skillfully crafted her mother's documents, interspersed with a powerful and informed narrative. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Kirschner knew that her mother was born in Poland, the youngest of 11 children, and that she had survived a Nazi camp and came to the U.S. as a war bride. In 1991, when Sala Kirschner was 67, she learned that she needed triple-bypass surgery and then showed her daughter a collection of more than 350 letters, postcards, and scraps of paper, some written in barely legible, tiny, cramped handwriting, others in beautiful italic script, and some dashed off in blunt pencil scrawls. They were from her years in seven labor camps from 1940 to 1945. The letters were written by more than 80 people and they told the story of a family, a city, and an elaborate system of slavery. There are hand-drawn birthday cards, some with poems, and love letters that had been smuggled to Kirschner's mother by a suitor named Harry. Kirschner posits that these private papers "create an emotional history of the war, a complex figure of fear, loneliness, and despair, always returning to the dominant theme of hope for tomorrow." George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743289382
• ISBN-13: 978-0743289382
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #627,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ann Kirschner is the author of "Sala's Gift," the story of what happened when her mother broke her 50-year silence and gave her the letters, photographs, and documents that she received in German slave labor camps.

Ann Kirschner is the University Dean of Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton. Her career as an entrepreneur in media and technology included the creation of NFL.COM and Fathom.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Moving, November 28, 2006

By 

Ace (East Coast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story (Hardcover)

I grew up in NY City in the 50's, and was taught about the Holocaust at a very early age - a sobering education for a child just beginning to understand the world into which I was born. A few of my neighbors had survived the concentration camps (including one beautiful sweet young lady -- my heart went out to her), but not much was said about it.

Sala's Gift, with its detailed narrative opened my eyes even more than I expected, and adds so much more to the human aspect of the holocaust experience. Anne Kirschner, with her meticulous research, her stellar narrative and her deep love for her mother Sala and her mother's journey, brings us into Sala's home, her youth, lets us meet her family, mingle with her friends - we celebrate the Sabbath with the Garncarz family, we admire their sparse home filled with love, if not always with the daily necessities of life. How loving they were -- how brave they were, even in the most peaceful of times!!

Although the brutality of the concentration camps was not dwelled upon, the human fortitude and camaraderie forged from suffering and deprivation certainly was. How amazing to read about Sala and her camp friends, who looked after one another and made the best of a terrible situation -- the "birthday cake" of layered pieces of bare-subsistence bread being one example. This network of friends, acquaintances and even the friendship of some of the camp commanders were harbors in the storm for Sala, and her camp friends as well. As goes the song (based on an inscription found shortly after the Holocaust) "I believe in Hope, even though I do not see it" and the oft-sung (after 9/11): "Within the darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away", Hope was kept alive, by letter, by word, by a friendly gesture even in the meanest of places.

Ala's love, devotion and dedication to Sala's well being -- sparked by a chance meeting at the railroad station as Sala is about to take leave of her grieving mother -- is a glue that binds souls together and endures, even after separation. What perhaps might have happened had not those two souls met?? Sometimes we meet up with angels, who bless and ennoble our lives at a time when their presence is most needed, even thought these angels sometimes turn out to be all too human.

The reader is made to feel so much a part of this human condition, and I, like Ann Kirschner, exclaimed loudly and sadly when I read about Ala's tragedy -- and also rejoiced when Sala showed so much spunk and initiative, not only throughout her ordeal, but after her liberation, traveling to so many cities, centering and discovering herself and making her own life, after having been through so much hell.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough -- it should be required reading as should some of the references listed in the book's "source notes".

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, November 20, 2006

By 

Princeton Reader "Princeton Reader" (Princeton NJ) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story (Hardcover)

Highly Recommended! What is it like to be a teenager and be sent to a Nazi labor camp away from home? How is it like for the family left behind? The combination of a fluid narrative and beautiful autentic letters makes for a powerful reading experience like no other book.My heart went for sala and her family. Her grace while enduring the darkest of human experiences is truly captivating. Would you believe that the picture of beautiful Sala on the cover was taken during a three day vacation from labor camp spent with her family and friends in Sosnowiec?a slave on a three day break? All I see in her face is love light and beauty there is no hatred depression or darkness. The love of her family,truth and the hope for the future. Having your children born in a free land and bringing the story and the letters to light. Thank you Sala:you gave us a hugh gift and thank you Ann, second generation of love and light.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, November 28, 2006

By 

L. Burnham (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story (Hardcover)

Richly detailed and meticuously researched, this moving account of the labor camps of the Holocaust is also a well-written and memorable read. I found myself engaged from the opening sentence, and as soon as I had reached the final page, I went right back to the beginning in order to "re-view" the characters from the point of their lives after the ordeal of the Holocaust. Thank you, Ann Kirschner, for this gift of a book.