Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story [Buy Paperback Here].

(New York: Free Press, 2006) [ISBN-10: 1416541705]

For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept hidden from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann, her daughter, and offer to answer any questions Ann wished to ask. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Germany, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty. [from Amazon review page].

Dienststelle Schmelt

Before She Was My Mother (from page 9 of Sala's Gift)

We talked and talked. She tolerated my questions and my tape recorder, offering up revelation after revelation as if the prohibition against sharing her memories had never existed. She was telling these stories for the first time and I was an eager listener.

What I had always imagined as my mother's relatively brief ordeal as a prisoner in one Nazi camp turned out to be almost five years in seven different labor camps. She was one of about fifty thousand slaves, young and healthy Jewish men and women from western Poland. They were the valuable property of Organization Schmelt, an SS division that was set up soon after the Nazi invasion of Poland. [Oskar Schindler's camp was originally under Dienststelle Schmelt ], part of a network of over 160 camps run by an SS organization,

“Hundreds of labor camps were created in the early years of the war, usually attached to construction projects or factories that belonged to German businesses. Conditions varied, but in Salas camps, they wore whatever clothes they had brought from home. Unlike the prisoners of Auschwitz, these men and women were not tattooed with numbers. These Jews were meant to survive, at least to finish the day's work. They had been torn from their loved ones, they were hungry, they worked impossible hours under unimaginable conditions, they slept in overcrowded wooden barracks without heat or ventilation, and they lived in constant terror-but the Nazis delivered their mail. Letters and packages were allowed, even encouraged, as if they were not prisoners but first-time campers away from home and the Nazis were eager to reassure anxious parents that all was well. By the summer of 1943, however, all the regular mail stopped.

Organization Schmelt is a minor footnote in history. Relatively little has been written about the partnership between Nazi bureaucrats, Jewish leaders, and German businessmen that spirited away tens of thousands of people from the Eastern Upper Silesian region of Poland. Few books even mention Albrecht Schmelt, the chief architect who lent his thick slap of a name to a rapidly expanding slave trade that made him a rich man. The existence of labor camps where Jews received mail is hardly known, and their locations are all but forgotten--except by those who were imprisoned there.”