Imagine a world in which the rule of law and social order totally break down and people revert to behavior based only on their drive for dominance or survival.
George Lucius Salton does not have to imagine it; he was a Jewish teenager in just such a world, in 1940s Poland and Germany. Between the ages of 11 and 17 Salton’s childhood collapsed into the nightmare of the Nazi persecution of European Jewry.
Salton, author of “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir” (University of Wisconsin Press) will speak at the community Yom HaShoah Commemoration on Sunday, April 18, 2 p.m., at Congregation Sinai in Fox Point.
The event is a memorial to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and a remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and all resistance.
Salton will travel to Milwaukee with his daughter, Anna Salton Eisen, who co-wrote “The 23rd Psalm.” It was Anna and her two brothers who persuaded their father to tell his story, first to them and then to the world, Salton expained in a telephone interview from his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
In 1939, when Salton, then named Luzek Saltzman, was 11, he dug potatoes and split wood to help his family eat after his father was forbidden by the German occupiers to practice law in their hometown of Tyczyn, Poland.
Life gradually deteriorated; “by the summer of 1941, it had become possible for any German or Pole to kill any Jew, using any means, with no resulting investigation,” said Salton. “We were like ants.”
In his book Salton reports how, in the spring of 1942, he and his family were forced to march from their hometown to a ghetto in Rzeszow, six miles away. Within weeks his “parents were deported in boxcars to die in Belzec” and Salton and his brother were ordered to stay to do forced labor.
During the next three years, Salton was forced to slave in 10 concentration and labor camps. Although, “in a corner of [his] heart [he] still hopes for a letter” he knows that is only realistic to accept that his brother did not survive.
Like many survivors of the Holocaust, when he came to the U.S. Salton was not anxious to talk about what he had endured. “Initially, American Jews really didn’t want to know about it and our wounds were sufficiently fresh we didn’t want to talk about it.”
He wanted to begin a new life in America and, when he became a father, he wanted to have a normal relationship with his children. He did not want them to be tainted by fear or a feeling that their father needed to be protected. As the children grew older and learned more about the Holocaust, they began to ask him about his life in Europe.
Salton realized, to bear witness authentically, he needed to transport himself mentally and emotionally back to that time. Through this technique, he discovered that he could remember vividly and in great detail. “I could hear the knock on the door. I could see my mother crying. I could feel the fear,” said George Salton quietly, as he recalled a day Nazi soldiers came to home.
“The 23rd Psalm,” which was originally published in September 2002, will be released in paperback this month.
The Yom HaShoah Commemoration is a program of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and is partially funded through the JCC Raye and David David Yom HaShoah Endowment Fund, the JCC Luba Slosberg Memorial Endowment Fund and the Pincus and Bluma Weinstock Yom HaShoah Endowment Fund.
This year’s commemoration will also honor Michael Fountain, Capuchin, for his teaching of Holocaust studies. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In addition, awards will be presented to the winners of the Holocaust Youth Essay Contest, which is sponsored by the Habush Family Foundation.
The event chair is Sandra Hoffman. For more information call Dorene Paley, JCC community services director, 414-967-8217.
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