Feb. 1


USA: (re: book review)

Survivor describes camps in unembellished horror


What if Anne Frank had survived? What if she had walked out of
Bergen-Belsen, come back to Amsterdam after the war and opened her diary
again? What would she have written then?

Luzek Saltzman was 11 when the Nazi army occupied the Polish village of
Tyczyn in September 1939; 14 when he was marched through the gates of the
Jewish ghetto in nearby Rzeszow; and 17 when the U.S. 82nd Airborne
Division freed him from the concentration camp at Wobbelin, Germany, on
May 2, 1945. In between, he was moved through 10 concentration camps and
countless horrors, and this teenager survived.

A retired electrical engineer now living in Palm Beach Gardens -- he
changed his name upon entering the U.S. in October 1947 -- Salton has
written a memoir of those years that reads like a soft-spoken nightmare:
"One night a prisoner escaped. He dug under the fences and ran into the
woods. A guard saw him and chased him with the other guards. They quickly
caught and killed him. The next morning, we were called out for roll call
where they had laid his body. Oester (the camp commander) pulled a young
Jewish prisoner from our ranks and ordered him to lie down next to the
dead man. The young man begged for his life. Oester hit him with his
truncheon and kicked him until he was on the ground next to the body. The
young prisoner tried to get up on his knees. Oester took out his pistol
and quickly shot him in the back of his head. He fell to the ground.
Oester returned his gun to his holster, smiled at us, and walked away."

This is writing as stark and steady as a death march. There is not a
superfluous word here -- no tortured metaphors to temper the horror or
ghastly adjectives to cheapen it.

Perhaps because he is not a professional writer, Salton knows what too many
professional writers never learn: When there are no words to describe a
thing, you shouldn't try. If an event is truly dramatic, you do not need
to dramatize it; reporting will do.

In Plaszow, Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck -- from camp to camp,
boxcar to boxcar, memory follows memory in excruciating detail.

At Wobbelin, he traded two American cigarettes for a bowl of potatoes and
meat:

"I walked a short distance from the fire, sat on the ground and ravenously
ate the stew. An old prisoner came over and stood over my shoulder. I
waited for him to ask me for some stew. I had no intention of sharing.
'They are cannibals,' he said in Polish. 'Do you know what you are
eating?' 'Potatoes with meat,' I said, hoping that he would go away. 'No,
not meat. Human flesh cut from the dead. They are cannibals.'"

Was he really eating human flesh? Salton doesn't know, and so he doesn't say.
"I finished eating the delicious stew, and I did not care whether it was
true or not."

In The 23rd Psalm, George Salton has the wisdom to step aside and let
what he saw and heard speak for itself in simple, straightforward prose.
What he must have been feeling is either too obvious to mention, or too
horrific for words, and because he does not constantly remind us that
everything he says is true, or soften his story with a poetic halo of
literary language, we are convinced.

What would the teenager Anne Frank have written if she had survived? God
only knows. How did the teenager Luzek Saltzman survive to write this
unforgettable story? God only knows.

ron_hayes@...

Now in Paperback
by George L. Salton and Anna Salton Eisen
March 2004
ISBN 0-299-17974-5 Paper $15.95 t
Hardback edition - October 2002
ISBN 0-299-17970-2 Cloth $24.95 t

(source: Palm Beach Post)