Sala's Gift

I'm going to win the "Absentee Blogger Award" for July as well as June if I don't get busy, so without further ado...

One of my recent read was Sala's Gift, the story of a young Jewish girl who survived the Holocaust in a series of labor (not death) camps. I find Holocaust literature extremely compelling in general, and will read just about anything on the subject.

This story is told by Sala's daughter, Ann Kirschner, who never knew much about her mother's Holocaust experience until late in her life, when she gave her daughter a collection of letters and even photographs that she had miraculously saved throughout her time in the camps.

The story is interspersed with translations of the letters both to and from Sala, and like every survivor's story I have ever read, the thin line between hope and despair, between life and death, between survival and defeat, is followed by Sala, who spent years in labor camps in various parts of Poland.

Some of the letters are written in Polish, although later they had to be written in German, so I was able to read bits and pieces of the originals from the reproductions in the book. I've been in some of the locations mentioned, too.

But yesterday, I was in the city, and saw a notice about an exhibition of the original letters (apparently the first European exhibition, although the letters have been displayed in the US). It's at the Galicia Jewish Museum. I'll definitely make a point of getting down there before the end of September!


And on a completely unrelated note...am I the only one who can no logger upload pictures on blogger? What happened?