“What else can I tell you about the ghetto?” asks 95-year-old Renee Salt, as she tells her life story to Kate Thompson, award-winning author of “The Little Wartime Library.” “I got up hungry and cold. I went to work and then came home with barely the energy to climb into bed and fall asleep.”
In recalling the horrid life in the ghetto, she acknowledges the trauma it caused her. “I’d never seen a dead man before then, never mind ten,” as she described a scene of dangling bodies from the gallows. “It was something that you could never forget, and it has stayed with me for the rest of my life.”
Renee Salt (L) collaborated with author Kate Thompson in writing her memoir. Kate Thompson
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From Privilege to Prisoner
Renia (Salt’s Polish childhood name) grew up in Zdunska Wola in central Poland. At that time, it was the economic center for weaving and textiles, and her father, an accountant at one of the factories, was a respected member of the community. Her mother Sala was a “balabusta,” or homemaker. She also had a younger sister, Stenia. Like many households back in the day, her mother was the heart of the household.When Germany bombed Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, centuries-old historical landmarks, synagogues, churches, and libraries were annihilated. There was no refuge for Polish Jews as Hitler’s blitzkrieg swept through the nation.
By the beginning of 1940, when Renia was 10 years old, her family was relocated into an enclosed area in her hometown city—the Zdunska Wola ghetto—guarded by the German Order Police. After two years, Renia and her family moved to the ghetto in Lodz, where her paternal grandparents were. In both ghettos, they were put to work for 8 to 14 straight hours daily, making army uniforms. Total obedience was expected, otherwise they were whipped or put to death.
After nearly four years of such an existence, Renia and her parents were herded into a freight train to make the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, this time, her father was separated from the group. Here, mother and daughter came face-to-face with Josef Mengele, who, playing God, determined who lived and who were to be sent to the gas chambers.
Although transit prisoners, they were still exposed to and dealt with the horrors that made Auschwitz infamous. They were transported again, this time into the heart of the Third Reich to Hamburg, Germany. Renia and her mom were now reduced to doing the backbreaking work of clearing rubble—one brick at a time. Starving and weak, Renia and her mother somehow managed to do the physical labor forced upon them.
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As the Allied forces liberated the ghettos and camps that Renia and her mother had vacated, their version of hell extended into April 1945. From Hamburg, they were taken into a dense German forest where the Bergen-Belsen camp was located.
Here, at this stage of the war, the prisoners were essentially left to die. It wasn’t the fear of gas chambers or cruel whipping from SS soldiers that threatened their lives, but the lice, rats, flies, and fleas that caused dysentery, tuberculosis, and typhus.
Their roles had now reversed as Renia’s mother, who’d suffered an injury, was now confined to a stretcher. Renia stayed close but knew there was nothing she could do. “Do not cry when I die,” were her mother’s words to her as she awaited the fate she knew was to come.
After Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allies on April 15, 1945, the story follows Renia’s trek back to Lodz and, eventually, to her Zdunska Wola hometown to be reunited with surviving members of her family. They moved out of Poland to start a new life.
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View of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation. Public Domain
The Making of a Memoir
What makes this book different from other Holocaust memoirs is that as Salt recounts her story, Thompson fills in the blanks with historical and political context—information that a prisoner wouldn’t have had access to or knowledge of. The switch from first-person to third-person narrative, however, is seamless, and Thompson’s narrative provides the big-picture context, filling in the gaps, which readers will appreciate.The main body of the story, which describes the ghettos and camps, is disturbing and depressing—as to be expected. However, this is nicely bookended with the portrayal of her innocent childhood in Zdunska Wola at the beginning and testimonials from her children at the end. It’s a story of a childhood interrupted and the impact of what she lived through on her own children.
What also makes this particular memoir compelling is that the story is a tribute to Salt’s mother. “Mama’s love was the only thing that made life worth living, and she kept us going. We all drew our strength from her.”
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She also recalls one of her mother’s legacies: With all the hardships associated with camp life, her mama never stopped praying. “Her prayers left a huge impression on me,” said Salt, 85 years later. “It’s the same prayer I recite every night in Hebrew. That’s how I continue to feel connected to my mother.”
A Story to Tell
When the Germans separated children from their parents at one of the ghettos, her sister Stenia was taken to a nearby death camp, but, by some miracle, Renia managed to stay with her parents. “How else had I survived?” she questioned. “It is God’s will.” She knew that “God wanted [her] to survive, to tell others the atrocities the Germans were committing.”And tell, she did. “Indulge an old woman as I share my story,” Salt implores at the beginning of the memoir. She does so, not just through this book, but also through the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in England, where she tells visiting groups of school children her story and patiently answers their questions. She has also shared her experience with the Imperial War Museum in London and at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany.
Timed to be released around the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, the memoir is a personal account of human strength and resilience. Despite all of the deaths in Salt’s life, she learned to cherish the life she was blessed with.
A worthy read for this generation and the next—“lest we forget.”
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‘Do Not Cry When I Die: A Holocaust Memoir of a Mother and Daughter’s Survival in Jewish Ghettos, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen’
By Renee Salt with Kate Thompson
Alcove Press, March 4, 2025
Paperback: 320 pages
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