Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story is an account by Ann Kirschner of her mother Sala's experiences in the Holocaust, based primarily on a collection of letters her mother gave her, that she had received while in Nazi labor camps, written by about 80 correspondents. The most famous of the letter writers was Sala's friend Ala Gertner, who was hanged at Auschwitz for her role in the only armed uprising at the camp.
The original letters and Sala's diary are in the permanent collection of the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, and were exhibited to public in 2006. [1] The book was later adapted into a play by Arlene Hutton titled Letters to Sala. [2] The letters have also been the subject of a traveling exhibit. The letters at the NYPL are made available to students and scholars involved with productions of Letters to Sala [3]
The book was published by Simon and Schuster/Free Press in 2006, and has been translated into several languages: in German as Salas Geheiminis, Polish, as Listy z Pudełka, Italian, as Il Dono di Sala, French, as Le Secret de ma mère,, and Chinese.
It was reviewed by the New York Times, [4] and the first chapter was reprinted in that newspaper on Nov. 12, 2006 [5]
Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Maurice Bernard Sendak was an American author and illustrator of children's books. He became most widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.
Melvin Mermelstein was a Czechoslovak-born American Holocaust survivor and autobiographer. A Jew, he was the sole survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz concentration camp.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar, thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex built during World War II.
Ala Gertner, referred to in other sources as Alla, Alina, Ella, and Ela Gertner, was one of four women hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for her role in the Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944.
Yaffa Eliach (May 31, 1935 – November 8, 2016) was an American historian, author, and scholar of Judaic studies and the Holocaust. In 1974, she founded the Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research in Brooklyn, New York, which collected over 2,700 audio interviews of Holocaust survivors as well as thousands of physical artifacts. Eliach created the "Tower of Faces" made up by 1,500 photographs for permanent display at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Penguin Revolution is a Japanese shōjo manga series by Sakura Tsukuba. It was serialized by Hakusensha in the shōjo manga magazine, LaLa with its collected volumes published under the Hana to Yume Comics imprint with seven complete volumes. It has been licensed in North America by CMX, an imprint of DC Comics for manga. The series is about a high school girl who disguises herself as a young man to become the manager of an actor classmate.
Barbara Gittings was a prominent American activist for LGBT equality. She organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) from 1958 to 1963, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people by the largest employer in the US at that time: the United States government. Her early experiences with trying to learn more about lesbianism fueled her lifetime work with libraries. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its gay caucus, the first such in a professional organization, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in 1972. Her self-described life mission was to tear away the "shroud of invisibility" related to homosexuality, which had theretofore been associated with crime and mental illness.
Helen Rae Bamber OBE, néeHelen Balmuth, was a British psychotherapist and human rights activist. She worked with Holocaust survivors in Germany after the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. In 1947, she returned to Britain and continued her work, helping to establish Amnesty International and later co-founding the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. In 2005, she created the Helen Bamber Foundation to help survivors of human rights violations.
Ann Kirschner is an American entrepreneur, educator, and author of the books Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story and Lady at the OK Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp. A veteran of four start-ups, Kirschner launched the National Football League's NFL.COM and co-founded Columbia University's interactive knowledge network Fathom.com. She is Dean Emerita of Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York (CUNY), a University Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, a faculty fellow of the Futures Initiative, and interim president of Hunter College. She is the co-founder of the Women In Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York (WiTNY), a collaboration between CUNY and Cornell Tech to increase participation of women in computer science, and a trustee of Princeton University.
Irene Tomaszewski is a Canadian writer, editor and translator of Polish descent living in Montreal, Canada.
Holocaust Museum LA, formerly known as Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, is a museum located in Pan Pacific Park within the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors, Holocaust Museum LA is the oldest museum of its kind in the United States. Its mission is to commemorate those murdered in the Holocaust, honor those who survived, educate about the Holocaust, and inspire a more dignified and humane world.
The Pawnbroker is a 1964 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.
The International Museum of World War II was a nonprofit museum devoted to World War II located in Natick, Massachusetts, a few miles west of Boston. It was formed over a period of more than 50 years by its founder, Kenneth W. Rendell, one of the world's premier dealers in autographs, letters and manuscripts, who has earned international renown as an authenticator of historic artifacts. The museum's collections documented the events of the war, from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I to the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials. The museum's goal was to preserve the reality of the history of World War II and to provide an educational experience of the lessons to be learned. In 2016, the Museum of World War II became The International Museum of World War II to reflect its being the only museum in the world with an international collection of letters, documents, and artifacts.
Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Clara Estelle Breed was an American librarian remembered chiefly for her support for Japanese American children during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many residents of California who were of Japanese descent were moved to remote Japanese American internment camps where they stayed until the end of the war. Breed kept in communication with many of the children who were sent to the camps, sending reading materials and visiting them regularly.
Sala Kirschner was a Holocaust survivor whose correspondences with her friends and relatives during the Holocaust were turned into a New York Public Library exhibition and later book, Sala's Gift, which chronicled her experiences. The book was translated into seven languages, and turned into a play in 2013 by Arlene Hutton.
Arlene Hutton is an American playwright, theatre artist and teacher. She is best known for a trio of plays, set during and after the Second World War, known as The Nibroc Trilogy. The initial play of that trilogy, Last Train to Nibroc, was the first play to transfer from FringeNYC to Off-Broadway. Other works for which she is known include a one-act dramatic work about the aftermath of a sexual assault, I Dream Before I Take the Stand; a one-act musical drama set among the members of a Shaker community in the 19th century, As It Is in Heaven; and a Holocaust-themed work, Letters to Sala, based on actual documents. She has also created plays for young audiences.
Regina Safirsztajn (1915-1945) was a Jewish resistance fighter in the Auschwitz underground and one of four women hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for her role in the Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944.