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Historian Debórah Dwork and her students use a variety of sources--including government and philanthropic agency archives, newspapers, letters, memoirs and interviews--to understand the causes and impacts of the Holocaust and other genocides of the twentieth century. |
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Work to live
Professor Debórah Dwork's research
"I have the pictures of our dear father and dear mother, together with all the mail I received from home, starting from the first minute that I left for camp. All along, I watched it and guarded it like the eyes in my head, since it was my greatest treasure." —Sala Garncarz to sister Raizel after the end of World War II.
We learn about the young Sala Garncarz from the more than 300 letters, postcards, drawings and photographs from family and friends that she accumulated, concealed and carried with her during her five years as an inmate at seven Nazi labor camps. Sixteen-year old Sala was living with her family in Sosnowiec, Poland when she volunteered to take her sister Raizel's place at the first camp in 1940.
Clark Holocaust historian Debórah Dwork and her colleague Robert Jan van Pelt contributed an essay about the labor camps and the plight of Jews in occupied Poland to a recently published book called Letters to Sala: A Young Woman's Life in Nazi Labor Camps.* In their essay, Dwork and van Pelt draw upon their many years of experience researching the Holocaust to provide a historical context for Sala's personal experience.
The essay explains how Nazi policies affected Jews residing in the Upper Silesia region of Poland, where Sosnowiec is situated. The authors describe how the Nazi regime tried a number of different strategies designed to contain and segregate the Jewish population, to outright murder them and, sometimes, to utilize them as labor for the German war effort.
Before the war, Poland was distinguished by a relatively large Jewish population. During the war, it witnessed the establishment of ghettos in its cities, massive resettlement of Jews forced from other Nazi occupied countries, and the erection of labor and annihilation camps. Consequent to its importance as a vital industrial area, Upper Silesia's Jewish population was initially spared some of the harsher treatment accorded to those in other regions.
Dwork and van Pelt distinguish between the slave labor of the annihilation camps and the forced labor that Sala underwent. Those in the forced labor camps were needed for industrial output, and the Nazis wanted them fit enough to work. Neither deliberate starvation nor torture was employed, laborers received a pittance wage for their work, and, until mid-1943, they were able to exchange a limited amount of mail with the outside world.
Nonetheless, no medical care was provided to those in the camps, and it was not unusual for laborers engaged in physically demanding work to die from overwork, under nutrition and disease. Inmates who became unable to work were eventually sent to annihilation camps. Women laborers like Sala were in the minority and worked in various capacities as secretaries, seamstresses, and kitchen staff.
Sala toiled in the Schmelt camp system, named for SS Oberführer Albert Schmelt, who was in charge of forced labor in East Upper Silesia. After the Germans invaded, they appointed a Council of Jewish Elders that was expected, as one of its tasks, to supply Jewish labor to local industry. Moshe Merin, a Jewish resident of questionable character, was placed in charge of the Council.
Schmelt and Merin established a labor supply system that worked to each other's financial advantage. But Merin's motives were not entirely mercenary. He funneled some of the money he received from Schmelt into the Jewish Council where it was used to fund social services for the Jewish community. It was also the source of the token wages that laborers like Sala received.
Sala's internment in the labor camps was a blessing in disguise: nearly all of her family, including her parents, were killed at Auschwitz. But she and her sister Raizel survived, as did the letters Sala had received while in the camps. She continued to conceal her cache of correspondence until 1991, when she revealed it to her daughter. It has since been the subject of a New York Public Library exhibit, for which Letters to Sala was the companion volume, and the book, Sala's Gift, written by her daughter.
* Letters to Sala is available from the NYPL Library Shop.
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Additional Resources
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Sala Garncarz at age 12, Sosnowiec, Poland, 1936.
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Sala Garncarz Kirschner reading the Yiddish-language Daily Forward in Central Park,
New York, 1946.
Photographs ©2007 by Ann Kirschner.
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