Sala's Gift
My Mother's Holocaust Story
By Ann Kirschner
(Free Press, Paperback, 9781416541707, 320pp.)
Publication Date: June 12, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover
Categories: Historical - Holocaust, Holocaust, Personal Memoirs
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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.
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.
"Sala's Gift is truly a gift. Meticulously researched and respectfully presented, Sala's Gift is a singular work, carefully crafted. It extends our understanding of Jewish women and the manner in which they struggled for survival -- and for flickers of light amidst the darkness."
-- Michael Berenbaum, Founding Director, United States Holocaust Museum, and Professor of Theology, University of Judaism
"This is a truly remarkable book, one from which both the general reader and the most experienced scholar will learn what can be learned in no other way. I read books on the Holocaust for a living, and I have rarely read one so economical in its prose, so elegant in its presentation, and so human in its narrative frame. It has uncommon power and deep effect." -- Douglas Greenberg, Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation
"An intimate family memoir -- at once vivid testimony and moving narrative -- that opens up the larger horrors of the Nazi labor camps. Ann Kirschner has honored her remarkable mother by passing Sala's gift on to all of us."
-- Joseph Kanon, author of The Good German
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