Letters to Sala: A Young Woman's Life in Nazi Labor Camps

In October 1940, Sala Garncarz was sixteen, the daughter of a rabbi and teacher and the youngest of eleven children in a poor family living in Sosnowiec, Poland, close to the German border. When her older sister Raizel was ordered to report to a Nazi forced labor camp, Sala volunteered to take her place. Neither she nor her family suspected that six weeks of required labor would stretch to almost five years of slavery. Through letters from family and friends that she managed to hide and keep safe, Letters to Sala tells the story of one young woman's experiences in the most inhumane and unimaginable of situations. An essay by historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt provides background about the web of Nazi labor camps in occupied Europe, a less-documented and less-familiar aspect of the Holocaust. The illustrations in this volume are drawn primarily from the remarkable collection of more than 300 letters and other documents donated by the Kirschner family to the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library in April 2005. Letters to Sala is the companion volume for the exhibition on view from March 7, 2006-June 17, 2006.