In 1991, two days before Sala Garncarz Kirschner was to enter a New York City hospital for triple bypass surgery and more than four decades after being liberated from a Nazi labor camp, she handed her daughter a box that once held one of her childhood games.
“I think you should have this,” Sala said.
Her daughter, Ann Kirschner, “thought she was bringing me her jewelry for safe-keeping, and instead of gold or silver, there was something else far more precious.”
Inside the box, Ann found a worn brown leather portfolio filled with hundreds of postcards and letters written to her mother from friends and siblings during Sala’s internment in Nazi labor camps from 1940 to 1945.
Ann sifted through the documents in disbelief — her mother had never mentioned the existence of such artifacts, nor had she ever heard of a Holocaust survivor receiving mail in a Nazi camp.
“Here were these jewels of history and memory she had so carefully protected,” Ann said. “I was surprised, stunned and then obsessed. Who wrote the letters? What did they say? How did she save them? Where were these people now?”
Years later, in 2005, Sala and her family donated the letters to the New York Public Library. A portion of the collection is now on display in the Katz Snyder Gallery located on the second floor of the JCC of San Francisco.
Ann Kirschner, who lives in Manhattan, will be at the JCC Monday, Nov. 16, to give a talk about her book, “Sala’s Gift,” and a gallery tour at 7 p.m.
“When I was doing research for book, I visited Holocaust archives all over the world and I never found anything like this collection of letters,” Ann said.
Sala was 16 years old when in 1940 she was sent from her home in western Poland to Geppersdorf, a German forced labor camp where Jewish men were building the Autobahn and women worked in the laundry and kitchen.
Through 1943, Jews in labor camps could receive mail. During Sala’s five years of internment, which took her to seven different camps in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, Sala received more than 300 letters that were mailed or smuggled to her by friends and family on the outside or in camps themselves.
She hid these letters under her clothes, handed them to friends who had already passed through inspection, dug holes and buried them in the ground, hid them in the barracks.
When Ann showed them to archivists, “they couldn’t believe they had survived … and still looked in such pristine condition,” she said.
Ann began sorting through the letters and organizing them by date as best she could. She then had the letters translated into English from Polish, Yiddish and German.
“Bit by bit I began to give [the translators] letters and get the translations back from them, which was amazing because it was as if I was receiving the letters in real time, like people were writing to me, and the letter writers became very familiar to me as if I knew them,” Ann said.
Next, Ann interviewed her mother and tape-recorded all of their conversations. The story widened further as Ann began tracking down those letter writers who were still alive.
In 1994, Sala, her husband and their three children flew to Europe and retraced Sala’s steps through the war.
Ann returned to her home in New York and wrote 100 pages of a book about the experience and her mother’s story. But publishers weren’t interested.
The project sat idle until 2002, when one of the letter writers — Raizel, Sala’s sister and Ann’s aunt — died.
“That’s when I realized it wasn’t about the book — the book is hubris. It’s about preserving these letters for the next generation,” Ann said.
With her mother’s blessing, she donated the collection to the New York Public Library. Jill Vexler, an anthropologist, took over as the guest curator.
“I was enraptured with this story,” Vexler said. “There was clearly something really urgent about these postcards. Something panicky. The writing was so small as if to say, ‘How can I get as much as I can on this little piece of paper?’ These were not wish-you-were-here postcards.”
The exhibit opened at the library in 2006; later that year, after rewriting the manuscript, Ann finally published her book, “Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story.”
More than 27,000 people visited the exhibit.
“My mother gets such joy out of seeing how people’s lives have been touched by the letters she saved,” Ann said.
Sala, now 84, lives in Manhattan with her husband, Sidney Kirschner. The couple spends winters in Florida. Both viewed the exhibit at the New York Public Library and were thrilled to see a big crowd on opening night.
Vexler points to Ann’s discovery of her mother’s letters as an important lesson for anyone with aging parents.
“We’re such a throwaway society, but if we stopped to think before we throw our parents or grandparents’ things away, we may encounter phenomenal sources of learning,” Vexler said. “We can only be enriched by such first-hand history.”
“Letters to Sala” is on display during all regular hours at the JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. Ann Kirschner will speak about her mother, Sala, and her book, “Sala’s Gift,” at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16. To pre-register, call (415) 292-1233.