SALSITZ, Norman 1920-

PERSONAL:

Born Naftali Saleschutz, 1920, in Kolbuszowa, Poland; immigrated to United States, 1947; son of Isak Saleschutz (a businessman); married Amalie Petranker (a Hebrew teacher), 1945; children: Esther Cylia Dezube. Ethnicity: Jewish. Education: Educated in Poland. Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Conservative Judaism." Hobbies and other interests: Stamp collecting, coin collecting, photography, antique collecting.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Springfield, NJ. Office—c/o Author Correspondence, Syracuse University Press, 621 Skytop Rd., Suite 110, Syracuse, NJ 13244-5290.

CAREER:

Worked as a builder in New Jersey; writer and photographer. Military service: Served in Polish army, 1942-45.

MEMBER:

Magen David Adom, suburban chapter (president), Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Bnai Brith, Hazak, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Names Man of the Year by B'nai B'rith, and Israel Bonds.

WRITINGS:

(With wife, Amalie Petranker Salsitz) Against All Odds: A Tale of Two Survivors, Holocaust Library (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Richard Skolnik) A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1992.

(With Petranker Salsitz, and Amy Hill Hearth) In a World Gone Mad: A Heroic Story of Love, Faith, and Survival, Abingdon Press (Nashville, TN), 2001.

(With Stanley Kaish) Three Homelands: Memories of a Jewish Life in Poland, America, and Israel, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

They Deserved to Be Remembered: "You Are Still Alive? I Thought They Killed All of You."

SIDELIGHTS:

When Norman Salsitz was given a camera during his boyhood in Poland, he could not have predicted that the pictures he took of his hometown and his Jewish friends and family there would be the only record of their existence by 1945. As his town, relatives, and friends were successively obliterated by the Holocaust, Salsitz survived by being physically hardy and by assuming a false identity smuggled to him by a sympathetic Polish citizen. He hid his precious photographs in the thatch on barn roofs so that, should he not escape the Nazis, his record of Jewish life might some day be found. Salsitz's wife, Amalie Petranker, suffered similar hardships and terror during the Holocaust years—they met when Salsitz was sent to retrieve top-secret information from her, and then shoot her. One of the most improbable stories of love and survival in the twentieth century, the saga of Norman and Amalie Salsitz provides important details of Jewish life in Poland before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Salsitz has donated his photographs to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. In Washington some of them appear in the memoirs he and his wife have written together and in books he has worked on with coauthors. Everything he writes is intended to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and the heartless extermination not only of Jews themselves but of the physical evidence of their existence, including the very homes they lived in. "I tell and I tell and I write and I speak," Salsitz said in the San Francisco Chronicle. "We shouldn't let people forget."

In books such as A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, In a World Gone Mad: A Heroic Story of Love, Faith, and Survival, and Three Homelands: Memories of a Jewish Life in Poland, Salsitz recalls the joys and sorrows of growing up Jewish in a small Polish town, the encroaching horrors of the Nazi occupation, the forcible relocation of Jews to ghettos and then concentration camps, and the desperate measures people took to save themselves and their families. In AB Bookman's Weekly Carl Simmons wrote: "Salsitz's story is one of both love and sadness toward the land he escaped in 1941—but not before he and other Jewish youths were forced by the Nazis to take his ghetto apart, brick by brick." Slavic Review contributor Marsha Rozenblit noted that in A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, Salsitz "movingly describes Jewish family life, education, economic activities and the inroads of modernity in a very traditional community." Rozenblit found the author's reflections to be "indispensable tools for understanding how ordinary human beings coped with the horrors of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry."

U.S. News and World Report correspondent Dan Gilgoff described how Salsitz collected photographs from homes in the Jewish ghetto and hid them away with those he had taken himself. Salsitz lived to retrieve the pictures after assuming a false identity and becoming an officer in the Polish army. Gilgoff declared: "Today, Salsitz's two albums of black-and-white photographs form a comprehensive depiction of Jewish life in his town from before the war through the first year in the ghetto." Salsitz's written histories help give the photographs more meaning in the context of the Holocaust. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded of Three Homelands: "What makes these vignettes worth reading is the sense of place." The same critic felt that Salsitz's "characters seem to spring off the pages." Salsitz himself told a writer for the Newark, New Jersey Star-Ledger: "The irony hasn't escaped me. Because I was sent to destroy the last remnants of Jewish life in the ghetto, I was able to preserve a major record of that life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

AB Bookman's Weekly, March 29, 1993, Carl Simmons, "America, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Identity," pp. 1334-1335.

Booklist, September 15, 1991, George Cohen, review of Against All Odds: A Tale of Two Survivors, p. 117; December 15, 2002, George Cohen, review of Three Homelands: Memories of a Jewish Life in Poland, Israel, and America, p. 729.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1992, review of A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, p. 309.

Library Journal, April 15, 1992, Gerda Haas, review of A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, p. 104.

Publishers Weekly, October 28, 2002, review of Three Homelands, p. 61.

San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1998, Amy West-feldt, "Pair's Tale of Hiding, Survival," p. A8.

Slavic Review, summer, 1995, Marsha Rozenblit, review of A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, pp. 455-456.

Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), November 21, 1996, "Jewish Record Spared from Axes," p. 1; "Woman Outwitted Nazi Murderers," p. 1; March 30, 1998, Bob Braun, "Pretzels, Plum Brandy, and a Thirst to Repay Generosity from Long Ago," p. 17.

U.S. News & World Report, July 9, 2001, Dan Gilgoff, "Gone, but Never to Be Forgotten," p. 44.