I have spent more than 15 years working on a collection of letters that my mother Sala received during her years of imprisonment in Nazi slave labor camps. These letters were so precious to her that she risked her life again and again to preserve them – yet when she arrived in the United States as the war bride of an American GI, she put them in a closet and said nothing about them, or about her experiences, for nearly 50 years, until fears of death forced her hand, and she gave the letters to me.
My mother overcame her illness, and is now 83. I have learned so much from her and from these precious documents, but there are still places I cannot follow her.
The youngest of 11 in a religious Polish-Jewish family, my mother was a bold and resolute sixteen- year-old when her older sister, Raizel was summoned to a Nazi slave labor camp. Sala volunteered to take Raizel’s place because she believed that her sister’s strict and uncompromising piety would make it hard for her to adjust to the unknown conditions of the camp.
It was Raizel who then became the family scribe, writing over 100 letters to Sala. Most of the letters were written in German, so that the Nazi censors could read them.
A team of translators and I had to puzzle through many codes and abbreviations, their meaning long forgotten by my mother. Raizel wrote about “weddings” to which she had not been invited: this meant that there was a deportation that she had escaped. “GSD” we eventually realized meant “Gottseidanken,” or Thank God.
But Raizel’s religious beliefs went far deeper than a simple abbreviation. Hardly a single letter was sent without a pointed reminder from the older sister to the younger to observe strictly the Jewish holidays, to remain true to their family faith, and always, always “remember God.” Raizel expressed some doubt only once, when she wrote that “God seems to have turned away from here.”
A few months later, she and another sister, Blima, were deported to a slave labor camp and my grandparents were taken to Auschwitz.
We inherit religion, not faith. Sala’s faith wavered after the war, as she tried to make sense of a world in which so many friends and family had been murdered. She did not stray far, however. As a young mother in New York, she returned to religious observance, first out of respect to her parents, until gradually, her spiritual equilibrium was restored.
I know the voices of my mother’s letters so well that I can recite some of them by heart. But still, there is that gigantic chasm that I cannot cross, the gap between what I merely read from a comfortable distance and what they experienced. The chasm is deepest when I try to cross to the realm of belief, and to understand how they sustained themselves spiritually despite the deprivations of the camps.
My mother’s letters were critical to her survival, and became in some ways essential to her faith that she would survive. In her first letter to Raizel after the war, she wrote: ‘’I have all the mail I received from home, starting from the first minute that I left for camp. All along, I watched it and guarded it like the eyes in my head, since it was my greatest treasure.”
She saved the letters, and the letters saved her.
Monday-Friday, ”Letters to Sala” will be on display in the Rotunda of the Russell Senate Office building in Washington. Ann Kirschner is the author of SALA’s GIFT, about the revelations of the letters saved by her mother. She is also the University Dean of Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York.
