{"id":803,"date":"2008-09-03T21:01:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T04:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=803"},"modified":"2019-07-14T17:52:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T21:52:00","slug":"thursday-book-club-inspired-by-poland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/thursday-book-club-inspired-by-poland\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Book Club: Inspired by Poland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week<\/a>, I told you how my recent trip to Poland<\/a> inspired me to read Sala’s Gift<\/a><\/span> and The Lost<\/a>, but I never got around to talking about the books themselves. I’ll rectify that now and, to thank you for your patience, I’ll throw in a number of bonus book suggestions as well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sala Garncarz (right) and her friend Ala Gertner<\/a> in 1941
In 1945, Ala was executed for participating in the only armed uprising in Auschwitz.
The camp was liberated shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

<\/a> <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

You’re never going to find a cheerful Holocaust book, but Sala’s Gift<\/a> by Ann Kirschner is as close as you’ll get, thanks to the resilience of its subject, Sala Garncarz of Sosnowiec, Poland. In 1940, 16-year-old Sala volunteered to take her older, more delicate sister Raizel’s place in a Nazi slave labor camp. Sala was supposed to be there for six weeks; instead she spent five years in seven different camps until she was liberated in 1945. She survived thanks to a combination of luck and personal charisma that helped her create a support network wherever she landed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sala and her boyfriend, Harry <\/a><\/span> Haubenstock<\/a>, in a labor camp in 1942.<\/span>
He survived the war too.
When Sala went to meet him in Prague as arranged, he’d already married another woman.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/div>\n

Another thing that gave Sala the strength to keep going — and the basis for the book — was the collection of letters from family and friends that she managed to smuggle with her from camp to camp, even though such keepsakes were forbidden. After the war, Sala married a Jewish-American soldier named Sidney Kirschner. Ann Kirschner, the author of the book, is their daughter. Sala didn’t speak of the war to Ann or her other two children until 1991, when, faced with triple-bypass surgery at the age of 67, she handed Ann her collection of letters and photographs, which she had hidden in the box of a game called Spill & Spell<\/a>. (The collection was donated to the New York Public Library in 2005; the library site<\/a> is the source of the two photos used above.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sala and her granddaughter Abby in 2006<\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/div>\n

Only two of Sala’s family members survived the war: her sister Blima and — amazingly — Raizel, the sister that everyone thought was too delicate to survive hardship. With Blima’s help, Raizel not only survived the Neusalz slave labor camp; she also survived a 280-mile, two-month-long death march from Neusalz to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Death marches took place at the end of the war. When the Nazis realized they were losing, they tried to cover up their crimes by tearing down camps and keeping survivors out of the hands of the Allied armies. To achieve the latter, they’d force their barely clothed and starving prisoners on marches to distant camps in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. People dropped dead as they walked from cold and starvation, and others who fell behind were shot. A thousand women began the march with Raizel and Blima; fewer than 100 lived till the end. Those of you who have read the diary of Anne Frank<\/a> will remember her beau, Peter. He apparently survived<\/a> a march from Auschwitz, but died shortly after, as others did from the privations they suffered during a march. (Those of you who haven’t read Anne Frank’s diary should read it immediately or be shamed for life. That book is required reading for everyone.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This unflattering photo of Anne Frank is often used on the cover of the diary.<\/span>
When my sister and I have bad hair days, we say we have “Anne Frank hair.”
Anne was actually a very beautiful girl.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Another survivor from Sala’s hometown of Sosnowiec was Wladyslaw Szpilman<\/a>. Szpilman’s family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto<\/a>; he was the family’s only survivor, thanks to luck (random good luck is part of every survival story) and his local fame as a pianist and composer. His account of his experiences became a book, The Pianist<\/a>, which was published immediately after the war but then suppressed for many years by the anti-Semitic Communist authorities in Poland. It was eventually made into the movie The Pianist<\/a>, which in 2003 won Oscars for best actor (Adrien Brody), best director (Roman Polanski) and best adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood).<\/p>\n

Embed from Getty Images<\/a>