Speaking last week at the Holocaust Survivors Centre Shul, Renee Salt recounted her tale of pain and loss as a child enduring Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and the death of her family.
Accompanied by co-author Kate Thompson, she was moved to tears almost immediately as she started reading from her book A Mother’s Promise, clearly taken aback by reading the words she had written out loud. Much of the audience followed soon after.
Describing such a session as moving, emotional or similar feels somewhat trite. It was that, but such adjectives downplay the message of what Salt and her fellow remaining survivors have been trying to get over for decades. A message of both remembrance and progress.
It’s a message that feels even more poignant writing on the day that two members of Israeli Embassy staff were shot dead outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC, an act fuelled by the same hatred that led to Salt and her family having to first escape their home country of Poland and then endure the hell of the camps. “The sad thing,” Salt said, reading from her memoir, “is that antisemitism is worse than ever. I never imagined that within my lifetime, there would, once more, be an explosion of hate-fuelled antisemitism.”
Salt’s younger sister Stenya did not survive the camps. She would have been 94, and the 98-year-old author writes: “I’d love to know what she would have been like if she’d been allowed to get old like me.” It was another moment that caught her. The two co-authors regularly clasped each other’s hand as they spoke.
The recollections of Salt’s parents were similarly powerful. She credits her mother, who died 12 days after being liberated, as getting her through the Holocaust. Her father had passed away before. When researching the book, his grave was discovered thanks to help from International Tracing Service, a part of the Wiener Holocaust Library. Salt learnt that he had “died of starvation or disease in January 1945”.
And how does Salt approach things now? “Maybe you’re wondering, do I forgive?” she read. “I don’t forgive. How can I? It’s not my right to forgive. Instead, I choose to live with love.”
The afternoon was given an even greater sense of importance thanks to the presence of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who took in the story intently from the front row. Addressing the audience later, he described the event as “a gathering of the Renee fan club, and I’m proud to be a member of that club”. It’s likely that the fan club will grow after reading A Mother’s Promise.
