Ann Kirschner - Salas Gift: My Mothers Holocaust Story

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

Raizel Garncarz,

April 24, 1941

I have the pictures of our dear father and dear mother, together with 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.

Sala Garncarz,

October 10, 1945

My mother had a secret.

I knew that Sala Garncarz was born in Poland, the youngest of eleven children, and that she had survived a Nazi camp. I knew the names of my grandparents. I had one living aunt, but I didnt know anything about the rest of our once large family, not even their names.

In rare moments of retrospection, my mother would tell us about her arrival in the United States as the war bride of a handsome American soldier, ready to build a new life. I liked hearing her tale, especially since my brothers and I had starring roles. But even as a child, I was unconvinced. My mother was substituting a happy ending for an untold story. So fast, so complete a transformation from Sala, the survivor, to Sala, the happy American housewife and mother, seemed impossible. It was as if she had been snatched by extraterrestrials in 1939, and set down in New York in 1946.

Where did the old Sala go? What happened in the camp? Why didnt she have a number tattooed on her arm?

I had no one to ask. I never broached the subject with my brothers or my father. My mothers silence seemed to swallow up questions before they could be spoken aloud. When someone elsea new friend, a careless relativewandered into the forbidden territory of Salas years during the war, she turned her face away as if she had been slapped. Not all survivors refused to speak, I knew, and not all children were eager to listen. I had friends whose parents wouldnt stop talking about the past. Enough already, my friends would say, were tired of playing Anne Frank.

I studied the faces in the old black-and-white photographs that stood like silent sentinels on her dresser. My favorite was a striking portrait of young Sala in profile, gazing intently at an older woman: My friend Ala Gertner, my mother told me. She offered no details. Where did they meet? What happened to Ala Gertner? Sala, with her thick, glossy hair pulled back from her face and cascading down her back, her sharp cheekbones catching the light, looked like an irresistible ingnue from my favorite old movies with Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Moira Shearer, Irene Dunne. Ala was not nearly as pretty, but there was something bold and sophisticated in the tilt of her hat and something hypnotic in the way her eyes locked with my mothers.

Of course, despite her best efforts, Sala could never build an impermeable wall between our present and her past. The fog seeped in. During the televised trials of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she sat and watched for hours, chain smoking, stony and silent. She read every Holocaust book, watched every Holocaust movie, observed every Holocaust anniversary, but silently, privately, as if I wasnt watching.

I thought she might yield when I became a mother. Lets give it a try, I decided, when my children were old enough to ask questions. My daughter was preparing a school project on family history and wanted to interview both of her grandparents. The setting was auspicious: we sat comfortably in my parents living room, the dishes washed and put away, the sofa cushions straightened, the toys back in the closet. My father was entirely cooperative, his memories of New York in the 30s charming and evocative. When it was Salas turn, she began to fidget, to squirm, unable to find a comfortable position. She threw out a few innocuous anecdotes, about the rag doll that was her only toy, about her circle of friends, their school uniforms. I had heard these all before. But then her discomfort became acute; her always troublesome arthritis and back pain interrupted her, she had to stand up, she had to walk around, and the tentative, sputtering flow of memory dribbled to a halt. She kept her secrets.

All that ended in 1991 on a day that would change her forever in my eyes, a day that was to change my life as well.

Sala was about to be admitted into the hospital and she was spending her last weekend with my family. New symptoms had become acute while she was traveling in Israel. Suddenly, the hills of Jerusalem were too steep for her to climb. She returned to New York and learned that she needed triple-bypass surgery.

She was sixty-seven years old, miserable in her first week of giving up smoking, and her hands looked empty without her usual cigarette. I could tell that she was getting ready to say goodbye. It was a beautiful summer day, we had just finished lunch, and I was sitting alone. She came outside to join me. In her hands, I saw a red cardboard box that had once contained my old Spill and Spell game.

She held it out to me and said, You should have this.

Her jewelry, I thought.

Instead, I found within the box a small, worn brown leather portfolio about the size of a paperback book. Within the portfolio were hundreds of letters, postcards, and scraps of papers, some written in barely legible, tiny, cramped handwriting, others in beautiful italic script, some dashed off in blunt pencil scrawls on scraps of ragged paper, all neatly tucked away. These are my letters from camp, she said. She spread them before me. Postcards and letters and photographs covered the table, the smell of old paper escaping into the summer air.

What do you want to know? my mother said.

And so I began to ask.

Questions spilled out randomly. Where had she been? Who had written the letters? How had she managed to save them? Where were these people now? My mother answered as best she could, her voice wound tightly around names and places long unspoken.

She was soon tired. Together, we returned the letters to the box that had held them for so longbut now the box was mine.