The hidden picture
Anna Salton Eisen was first introduced to the Holocaust when she was a young child and found a watercolor painting hidden in a drawer. This powerful and disturbing image was signed L. Salzman, a name she was unfamiliar with. Anna knew instinctively that she had stumbled across something she had not been supposed to find, so she put the picture back and never spoke of it.
It was only later that she learned that L. Salzman was in fact the original name of her father, George Salton, who had created this painting in 1946 at the age of 18 while living in a displaced persons camp. This was the first step in Anna’s journey to find out more about her father’s experiences during the Holocaust and search for the children of the men who had been held with him in various concentration camps.
A photograph of her grandparents
Anna also found this portrait of her grandparents that had been tucked away in the drawer of a bedside table along with the story of her family history. As she grew up, Anna’s parents, who were both Holocaust survivors, never shared the names of the many relatives who had perished in the Holocaust.
Anna’s father rarely spoke about his years in the concentration camps in an effort to protect Anna and her two older brothers from the horror of what he had endured. Not until Anna was an adult herself did she plead with her father to reveal his true history.
I rarely spoke of the Holocaust or my life before the war. But children are curious, and they began to ask questions and demand answers. They claimed my past as part of their own and wanted to know about the grandparents and uncle whom they had never met.
George Salton in his book “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir”
George Salton: Born Lucjan Salzman
George Salton (2nd from right in the photograph taken at Wöbbelin concentration camp) was born Lucjan Salzman in Przemyśl, Poland. His older brother Manek was about to start college in September 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Lucjan was about to enter the sixth grade. After two difficult years living under Nazi occupation, the family was forced to move to the Rzeszów ghetto. Conditions were terrible with hunger and disease rampant, as well as the ongoing brutality, violence, and murder at the hands of the Nazis.
In 1942, a small group of around 450 young Jewish men were separated from the nearly 23,000 Jews living in the ghetto. They were put to work as forced laborers in a factory that Daimler-Benz had taken over to manufacture small airplane engines. In the summer of 1942, the rest of the Jews in the ghetto were forced into boxcars cars and sent to be murdered in the Belzec extermination camp. Lucjan worked in the factory, which the Germans had renamed “Reichshof,” until Daimler Benz evacuated the facility in July 1944 as the Soviets were advancing into Poland.
The factory would be dismantled and moved to France. The Jewish forced laborers were first taken to the Płaszów concentration camp, then transferred to Wieliczka and Flossenbürg before finally arriving at a factory set up in a tunnel in Urbès, near Colmar, in August 1944. As the Americans swept across France, the factory was bombed, and the SS moved the remaining prisoners back to Germany. They passed through the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Watenstedt, Braunschweig, Ravensbrück, and Wöbbelin, where they were liberated by American soldiers on May 2, 1945.
Some of the stronger prisoners helped or carried the weak and sick so that they too would see that this day had come…We embraced and cried together. We told each other that we had survived and that we should never have given up hope. This was our day of glory. I stood together with Julek Schipper, Motek Hoffstetter, Moishe Ziment, Mola Tuchman, and Moses Verstanding.
George Salton in his book “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir”
Departure for America
Lucjan spent the following two years in the Neustadt refugee camp in Lübeck. His parents and brother did not survive the Holocaust. However, Lucjan found relatives in the USA and decided to emigrate there. He continued his life in America as George and served in the US army. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, a law that provided a range of benefits for veterans, he was able to gain a higher school-leaving qualification. He then embarked on a successful career at the Pentagon and in the American defense industry. George was married for 63 years to another Holocaust survivor named Ruth, and he passed away in 2016 while living in Florida. George had three children and six grandchildren.
A late find
After George’s death, Anna’s family discovered documents, including a diary, a calendar, and photographs of fellow prisoners from the displaced persons camps that her father had kept since after the war. George had kept a list of camps and prisoner numbers, along with his day of liberation, in a small notepad, for example. The documents she discovered brought Anna a new understanding of her father’s Holocaust journey.
A file containing 69 documents
Anna began to do some research and asked the Arolsen Archives for information about her father. She received a file containing 69 documents, including a post-war ID card that listed all ten camps and George’s prisoner numbers, arrival lists from several of the camps, and other postwar lists. These documents enabled Anna to research the history of her father, his family, his town, the ghetto, and the concentration camps he had been held in.
Journey into the past
In 1998, Anna, her parents, and two older brothers travelled to Poland, where they learned about the German invasion and occupation, visited the sites of concentration camps and ghettos, and traveled to her father’s hometown. They were even able to visit the house where he grew up. When they returned to the United States, Anna helped her father write and publish “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir,” which chronicled his Holocaust survival.
Friends from the DP camp
After her father’s death, Anna came upon photographs of his friends from the displaced persons camp that he had held on to for more than 75 years. George had mentioned some of the names on the backs of the photographs in his book. He made frequent references to a small group of his friends – young men who had shared his same fate and had been with him from the ghetto, through the ten camps, until liberation and beyond.
During their trip to Poland, George had shown Anna where some of these fellow prisoners had lived before the Holocaust. Throughout his life, her father had spoken of his friends with great admiration and gratitude, for they had all helped to keep each other alive. Anna decided to search for this special group of survivors and their families.
Moses Tuchman
… was mentioned in her father’s memoir. Anna found his name and date of birth on several camp lists in the Arolsen Archives. She also found other documents confirming that this was the same person who was from her father’s hometown and who had been his friend and fellow prisoner during the Holocaust. With the information from his post-war file, which also contained the name of his uncle in New York, Anna was able to find the living relatives of Moses Tuchman and ultimately connect with his two daughters.
Tobias Nussen
… was not mentioned by name in George’s memoirs, but his photograph was in the collection. In the Arolsen Archives, Anna found Nussen’s entry on several of the same camp lists and documents as her father and the other prisoners. Anna was able to match his signature on the back of his photograph with the signature on one of the concentration camp documents. She found out that this friend, too, had survived the Holocaust alongside George, and she was able to track down several of his relatives.
Izok Rypp
… is mentioned in George’s book as one of the “good young men” George had been with in the concentration camps. Anna found Izok’s name on several camp lists, usually just a few lines above her father’s name. He was one of the youngest in the group of forced laborers. Anna was heartbroken to find that the Arolsen Archives also held his death certificate. He died in a hospital in Hamburg two years after the war. Anna kept searching, but she could not find any living relatives.
Documents from the archives
The Arolsen Archives have numerous original documents about the persecution of George Salton’s fellow prisoners, including transport lists, registration lists, and certificates of imprisonment for various concentration camps. Documents from the post-war period provide clues to what happened to them after their liberation.
This registration document from the post-war period shows that Tobias Nussen wanted to emigrate to the USA in 1945, for example.
Tracing the families
After looking for information about her father’s fellow prisoners in the online archive of the Arolsen Archives, Anna also searched for their names on Ancestry.com – and found them on the passenger lists of ships that took Holocaust survivors to other countries. Social security cards documenting name changes, obituaries, and family trees helped her identify their living relatives.
The first big family meeting
On the morning of Sept. 26, 2021, family members of eight Holocaust survivors, who survived the Rzeszów Ghetto and ten concentration camps together, met for the first time at a hotel in New Jersey.
During the course of the emotional gathering, they shared their fathers’ stories and talked about their own experiences as the children and grandchildren of survivors.
Some traveled there in person from across the United States, while three families connected via Zoom from Texas, Israel, and Sweden. Anna used Google and Facebook to connect with the children of these fellow survivors, who all were surprised to hear from her and shared one thing in common: Each knew nothing about their Holocaust background until they read and found their fathers’ names and stories in “The 23rd Psalm.”
My parents wanted me to be untouched and untainted by their fate. But I believe that it is my responsibility to understand, to preserve and to impart this bitter legacy.
Anna Salton Eisen
Anna Salton Eisen has written a book about her life as the daughter of Holocaust survivors: “Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust” was published in April 2022. She is also the protagonist of a documentary film titled “In My Father’s Words.”
In 2021, she appeared as a guest at our online live event: Second Generation Talk with Anna Salton Eisen.