General

From 1940 to 1946, Sala collected 352 letters, documents, and photographs. I have edited and shortened the texts that are in Sala’s Gift – a total of 80 letters. The original letters are preserved as “The Sala Garncarz Kirschner Collection” at the Dorot Jewish Division of New York Public Library, and can also be found online through www.nypl.org and at www.letterstosala.org.

Prewar life in Sosnowiec, Poland and during the occupation

The description of life in Sosnowiec is based on my interviews with my mother and with Raizel, as well as invaluable discussions with Rose Grunbaum Futter, Sala Grumbaum Singer, Sarah Czarka Helfand, Gucia Gutman Ferleger, and Frymka Rabinowicz Zavontz.

Additional details about life in Sosnowiec before and during the occupation were drawn from Eyewitness Accounts of the Impoverishment, Enslavement, Murder of 100,000 Jewish citizens of Zaglembia, translated by Pawel Brunon Dorman. English Language Verifier: Amalie Mary Robinson. This unpublished collection includes 92 depositions taken immediately after the war. The original Polish documents are in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. My thanks to Jeffrey Cymbler for bringing this extraordinary resource, and other important bibliographic citations, to my attention.

See also the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities, Poland (Volume VII) Lublin Kielce districts, translation of Pinkas hakehillot Polin: entsiklopedyah shel ha-yishuvim ha-Yehudiyim le-min hivasdam ve-`ad le-ahar Sho'at Milhemet ha-`olam ha-sheniyah. Edited by Abraham Wein; Co-edited by: Bracha Freundlich, Wila Orbach, Authors: Daniel Blatman, Rachel Grossbaum-Pasternak, Abraham Kleban, Shmuel Levin, Wila Orbach, Abraham Wein. Published in Hebrew by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1999. Lance Ackerfeld and Osnat Ramaty have translated parts of this book as The Book of Sosnowiec and the Surrounding Region in Zaglebie by JewishGen inc. and The Yizkor Book project at www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_poland/pol7_00327.html. Also see Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact, (New York), 1973; and Hadasa Priwes’ article, “Under the Soldier’s Boots,” translated by

M. Hampel at www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Zaglembia/zag534.html.

Nazi labor camps and Organization Schmelt

The description of life in the Schmelt camps is based on my interviews with my mother and Raizel, as well as interviews with Hokilo Dattner, Zusi Ginter Bloch, Itka Ginter Bloch, Sala Grunbaum Poznanski, Rose Grumbaum Danziger, Tyla Oestreicher Beeri, Sarah Czarka Helfand, and Gucia Gutman Ferleger.

No comprehensive study of the Schmelt camps has yet been published in English. “Sala’s World,” by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt (Letters to Sala, NY: NYPL, 2006) provides an excellent overview of the Schmelt labor camps. My own first glimmers of understanding the context of Sala’s story came from Professor Alfred Konieczny’s entry on Schmelt in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, (Tel Aviv, 1990); “The ‘Schmelt Organisation’ in Silesia,” in Marcin Wozinksi and Janusz Spyra, eds., Jews in Silesia (Krakow: Ksiegarnia Akademicka, 2001), 173-179; and “Jewish Slave Labor Camp in Jeleniow, 1943-1944,” Wroclaw, Poland, 1999.

See also Avihu Ronen’s “Everyday Life in Schmelt Organizations’s Forced Labor Camps,” in Dapim Le’Heker Tekufat Ha’Shoah, Haifa: Haifa University, vol. 11 (1993), pp. 17-41. Professor Ronen has graciously summarized for me some of his relevant research, most of which is not yet published in English.

The history of the Reichstautobahn is discussed by Erhard Schutz and Eckhard Gruber in Mythos Reichsautobahn: Bau und inszenierung der “Strassen des Fuhrer” 1933-1941 (Berlin: Christopher Links, 1996), quoted by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt in “Sala’s World” in Letters to Sala, (New York: New York Public Library, 2006). Avner Feldman describes Geppersdorf in “In the Ghetto and Camps,” Zaglembie Memorial Book, edited by Y. Rappaport, Translated by Lance Ackerfeld, Edited by Judy Montel (Yawa Blettter, V. 30); English translation can be found online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Zaglembia/zag549.html.

Important discussions of the Nazi use of Jewish labor are found in Peter Hayes’s Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era Cambridge, UK

Cambridge University Press. 2000; in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971; in Konrad Kwiet’s

“Forced Labor of German Jews in Nazi Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXVI, Secher and Warburg. See also Christopher R. Browning’s Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press 2000; Browning’s Nazi Germany's Initial Attempt to Exploit Jewish Labor in the General Government: The Early Jewish Work Camps 1940-41, Germany, Edition Entrich, 1994; and his The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2004.

Other sources include Anatomy of the SS State, Helmut Krausnich et al, New York: Walker and Co, 1968; and Benjamin Ferencz’s Less Then Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002 reprint (1979).

A list of the Schmelt camps, with their dates of operation, and the German businesses that utilized them, is found within the “Catalogue of Camps and Prisons in Germany and German-Occupied Territories, September 1, 1939 – May 8, 1945, Prepared by International Tracing Service Records Branch, Documents Intelligence Section, Arolson, July, 1949, reprinted as Das Nationalsozialistische lagersystem (CCP), Frankfurt: 1990.

A helpful reference to the markings on the letters and postcards is Sam Simon’s Handbook of the Mail in the Concentration-Camps, 1933-1945; a Postal History, New York: Port Printed Products Corp, 1973.

Moses Merin and the Jewish Council

Moses Merin (also known as Moshe, Moniek, or Marek Meryn) appears as a character in Konrad Charmatz, Nightmares: Memoirs of the Years of Horror Under Nazi Rule in Europe, 1939-1945, trans. Miriam Dashkin Beckerman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press); and as Moniek Matroz in Ka-Tzetenik 135633’s Sunrise Over Hell, Corgi Edition, London, published 1978. (See an excerpted version “The Congregation – Council” at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Zaglembia/zag003E.html#page5)

Merin’s trusted secretary, Fani Czarna, is sometimes called Fania or Fanny or Felicia Schwartz, or “the black one.”

Merin and his administration are discussed extensively in Isaiah Trunk’s definitive Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. See also Philip Friedman’s “The Messianic Complex of a Nazi Collaborator in a Ghetto: Moses Merin of Sosnowiec" in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, New York and Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980; and his “Two 'Saviors' Who Failed: Moses Merin of Sosnowiec and Jacob Gens of Vilna,” in Commentary, 1958. For additional details, see “The Judenrat in Zaglembie (Under the Leadership of Moshe Meryn)” in the Zagmebie Yizkor Book, the Yizkor Book Project.

There is a provocative analysis of Merin and his policies at Avihu Ronen’s “Wer zum Leben, wer zum Tod,” edited by D. Kiesel et. al.Institutionen, Politik und Identitat der Judische Selbstwerwaltung im Getto Von Zaglembie (Institutions, Politics and identity of the Jewish 'Self-Government' in the Getto--A Case Study of Zaglembie), Frankfurt and New York: Campus verlag, 1992, excerpted at http://www.avihuronen.com/english/articles/eng-judenrat.html.

For the story of the South American passports, see Ruth Zariz, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 20, “Attempts at Rescue and Revolt: Attitudes of Members of the Dror Youth Movement in Bedzin to Foreign Passports as Means of Rescue,” Jerusalem

Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, 1976. Remarkably, Jeffrey Cymbler has acquired an original envelope handwritten by Ala Gertner, with her sister’s name and return address, written to Herr Szwarcbaum in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was mailed in February, 1943 but not received in Lausanne until November, at which point the Bedzin and Sosnowiec ghettos had already been liquidated and Ala was in Auschwitz.

August 12, 1942

These events were described to me by Raizel and Rose Grunbaum Danziger, both of whom were present at the Sosnowiec assembly point at the stadium. There are additional descriptions of the deportation in Eyewitness Accounts of the Impoverishment, Enslavement, Murder of 100,000 Jewish citizens of Zaglembia (see above). The comparison of the stadium field to an anthill is found in the testimony of Gena Lewkowicz, p. 79.

Depending on the source, the number of Jews captured in the deportation ranges from 30,000 to 70,000. The Sosnowiec stadium was probably one of several assembly points, with the others taking place at nearby Bedzin and D?browa Górnicza. Reports on the number of Jews sent to Auschwitz that week range from 4,000 to 30,000.

Avihu Ronen describes the massive deportation in “The Day of Disillusion: the Great Deportation from Zaglembie on 12.8.1942,” in Massuah, No. 17 (Apr. 1989), pp. 102-147; an abstract is available at http://www.avihuronen.com/english/abstracts/abs-punkt.html. For other accounts see “The Annihilation of Sosnowiec Jews,” by Natan Eliasz Szternfinkiel et al, publications of the Main Jewish Historical commission in Poland, #25, Katowice, 1946.

Ala Gertner and the Auschwitz Uprising

These events were described to me by Israel Gutman, Mala Weinstein, and Rose Meth. I am deeply grateful to them, to Lidia Vago for her advice and encouragement, and to Anna Heilman, sister of Estusia Wacjblum, for her willingness to read and comment on my account. The monument to the four heroines is in the garden of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

The most comprehensive reference on the Auschwitz uprising is Lore Shelley’s indispensable The Union Kommando in Auschwitz: the Auschwitz Munition factory through the Eyes of its Former Slave Laborers, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1996. Considerable inconsistencies remain about details such as the number of people involved, their roles, and the timeline of the smuggling effort. While many published accounts use January 6, 1045 as the date of the Auschwitz hanging, I have chosen to follow the date that Anna Heilman cites in Never Far Away. There are also differences of opinion as to the relationship between the Sonderkommando plot and other Jewish resistance plans. Erich Kulka, an historian and Auschwitz survivor, threw up his hands at the complexities – factual and psychological -- of creating the definitive account of the uprising. His conclusion was that the uprising was far less important to the Nazis than the underlying concern about sabotage. In his view, the four women were scapegoats who bore the brunt of Nazi fury over sabotage that was being practiced on a much larger scale.

For a sampling of the relevant scholarly research, see also Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974; Nathan Cohen, Diaries of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz: Coping with Fate and Reality; Jozef Garlinski, Fighting Auschwitz: the Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp, London: Julian Friedmann Publishers Ltd., 1975; Tzipora Hager Halivni, Preparing for Revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau; Heroes and Martyrs, World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem: 1989; and Halivni’s The Birkenau Revolt; Poles Prevent a Timely Insurrection, Jewish Social Studies 42, v. 2, New York, 1979; Anna Heilman, Never Far Away, Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2001; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1961; Ber Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985; Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz; New York: Stein and Day, 1979; Micheline Ratzerdorfer, “They Did Resist: Jewish Women's Resistance in Auschwitz,” Amit Women, Vol LXI, no 4,1989; Yuri Suhl; They Fought Back; the Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe; New York: Crown Publishers, 1967; Todorov, Tzvetan, Arthur Denner and Abigail Polk (Trans.), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.

Schatzlar, Neusalz, and Dyhernfurth

Details about the factories and daily life in the camps were the result of interviews with Raizel, Itka Ginter Bloch, Sara Czarka Helfand, and Frymka Rabinowicz Javontz (Neusalz); Sala Grunbaum Poznanski, Dasha Rittenberg, Tyla Oestreicher Beeri, and Gucia Guttman Ferleger (Schatzlar). The interviews about Dyhernfurth were conducted in 1993-94 in Israel by Ruth Winter.

The route of the Neusalz death march is traced in Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Holocaust, New York: William Morrow, 1993. See also the in-depth account in Bernard Robinson and Amalie Mary Reichmann-Robinson, “Some Consequences of the Schmelt Organization as Experienced by Affected Individuals,” available at

http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Zaglembie/Zag001.html; and Fela Kurzfeld’s description in Testimonials of Survival, 96 personal interviews from members of Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta, vol. 4, p. 1693-1708.

The description of the Dyhernfurth death march is based on a case that was filed by the US District Court for the Eastern district of Missouri, US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, against Adam Friedrich, an SS guard from Dyhernfurth: see the summary at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data2/circs/8th/041728P.pdf. The case also cites the Nuremberg Trial, 6 FRD, 69, 1008 (1946) quoting the June 21, 1945, report of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate’s Section of the third US Army.

Additional Sources and Inspirations

Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, New York: Norton, 1996.

Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)

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Appelfeld, Aharon, Beyond Despair, New York: Fromm International, 1994

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Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, New York, Penguin Books, 1976.

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Dobroszycki, Lucjan (ed.), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984

Dobroszycki, Lucjan and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Image before my Eyes: a Photographic History of Jewish life in Poland, 1864-1939, New York: Schocken 1977.

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