Review: Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story by Ann Kirschner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a wonderful yet heartbreaking story. This is the biography of Sala Garncarz, a young Jewish woman from the Silesia region of Poland in the 1940s. The story is told by Sala's daughter who often asked her mother what her experience was like in Poland during World War II. Sala would refuse to discuss this time until she was much older and she knew that if she was going to tell her story to her family, it should be sooner than later.

The story is told through a series of letters that Sala wrote and received during the war, as well as through diary entries she made and kept. Sala was the youngest of the large Garncarz family. As the war began in Europe, each Jewish family in Sala's small town had to send a family member to work for "six weeks" in a Nazi-run labor camp. The dreaded letter came to the Garncarz family requiring Sala's sister Raizel to report for work. The only way out would be to pay up or bribe the officers, but the Garncarzs did not have the money. Raizel was the more frail and frantic daughter and Sala was a young, bright, and vivacious teen who stepped up to take Raizel's place. After all, it was only to be for six weeks. It was one of many lies the Nazis told. On the appointed day, Sala gathered her diary and a few postcards and was accompanied to the train station with her mother and some of her siblings. There she met Ala, a young woman who promised Sala's mother that she would look after the young girl as if she were her own.

What follows is the details of Sala's life in a series of labor camps. Many people know about the concentration camps, but few books have been written about the labor camps. These were the factories that the Nazis needed running to help provide provisions for the war. Most of the people in these labor camps fared far better than those sent to the death camps. Mail and parcels were mostly allowed in and out of the labor camps but were not to be kept. Sala risked her life to keep these letters hidden through several transfers and inspections. Over 300 letters survived. It is through this correspondence that we see into another aspect of Nazi rule and the atrocities that Jewish people faced during the war. This story is at times heartbreaking but it also shows the courage that many had to keep going in light of what was happening around them.

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