An evening with Dr. Ann Kirschner, author of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story

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On Thursday March 22, 2007 the ASU Libraries and the Jewish Studies Program at ASU hosted a special event: An evening with Dr. Ann Kirschner, author of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story, in the Hayden Library on the ASU Tempe campus.

It was not until Sala (now 82) was scheduled for heart surgery in 1991 that she showed Ann a priceless collection of more than 350 letters and a diary from her years in the Nazi work camps, documents that she had kept carefully hidden in a cardboard box. She had risked her life to preserve these letters, hiding them from Nazi guards during line-ups, handing them off to friends, throwing them under a building, even burying them, but always managing somehow to take them with her from camp to camp. Scholars have declared this collection to be one of the great treasure troves of its kind. As the letters pass from the Kirschner family to history, they are becoming the genesis of many creative and scholarly works.

In the hands of Ann Kirschner, they form the basis of one of the most moving, inspiring, and eye-opening Holocaust stories in decades. SALA’S GIFT: My Mother’s Holocaust Story (Free Press: Fall 2006; $26.00) captures the horror of Sala’s astonishing odyssey through the Nazi labor camps—which are far less understood than the extermination camps—and deftly weaves the letters into a compelling narrative.

Topics include:

• What it was like for Ann to discover her mother as a beautiful, brave teenager and how it changed their relationship.
• The day-to-day moments of hope, despair, and details of wartime Poland, told from a unique perspective.
• What happened to the rest of Sala’s family and why Sala kept the letters a secret for so many years.
• Sala’s close friendship with Ala Gertner, who was hanged publicly at Auschwitz in the final days of the war for helping to organize the camp’s only armed uprising.
• Why the letters, diary, photographs, and keepsakes are such a valuable part of survivor history.
• What the letters reveal about the elaborate system of Nazi slave labor camps.

Speaker:

Introduction by:

Episode 38