When Renee Salt closes her eyes, she will be able to nonetheless visualise her elegant, well-dressed mom, Sala. “Lovely skin, beautiful hair. She was my whole life, such a loving kind mother,” she tells me of her devoted mother or father who died 12 days after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen focus camp aged 42. “It was an idyllic childhood full of love. She would sit and read with me and my
little sister or take us for walks in the park to play with other children. She wanted us to go to Paris for further education.” It appeared unimaginable that only a few years later, after Germany invaded Poland, Sala could be pressured to attempt to save her
two daughters by hiding them underneath her coat because the Nazis liquidated the ghetto the place Renee’s household had been despatched. When Renee’s little sister was marched off to sure demise, Sala fought to make sure her elder daughter remained protected by means of the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen – giving mom and daughter one thing stunning to cling to in a wicked world. “We lived for each other, and it was all God’s wonder and will,” Renee, now 95, and also called Renia, says. “Once in the ghetto, mama exchanged her cardigan for a cabbage, to give me a taste of some other world. “By the time we got to Auschwitz three years later, we were so hungry we’d have eaten a piece of wood.” It was August 24, 1942 – simply 16 days after Renee’s thirteenth birthday – when her household was cruelly torn aside. By this time, that they had misplaced their residence in Zdunska Wola, in central Poland, to the Nazis and, like many different Jews, had been residing in a ghetto. Then got here the fateful day an order crackled over a loudspeaker directing the terrified occupants to collect and sit down within the sq.. Then got here the second order: “Parents should hand over all children up to 18 years of age.” Renee’s eyes spill with tears as she speaks in Polish-accented English, eight many years later: “It’s not possible to describe this scene. I can only give you an idea about it.” She noticed youngsters massive and small, together with toddlers and infants, forcibly separated from distraught mother and father. “Some of the big ones were carrying younger siblings. They were put in covered lorries and taken away,” she says in faltering sentences. The crying of the kids, and the screaming of their moms, nonetheless rings in her ears right now. “My mother tried to hide Stenia, who was 11, and me, who was two years older, by covering us with her coat.” But a guard seen what she was doing. “She tried to hide me on one side and my sister on the other, but the Germans got hold of Stenia and my mother got a beating. A guard was hitting her everywhere. “My sister begged him, ‘Please don’t hit her. That’s not my mother’. A small girl with tears running down her face, trying to protect our mother. It is one of the most horrible things.
“We were two peas in a pod. We played together, we were always together. Then, after our mother was beaten, Stenia was taken away from us with tears running down her face. We never saw her again, but I know what happened to her. It felt like my heart had been cut in half.” Sala tried to deal with the unfathomable loss by pushing all her survival intuition into Renee.
“She was broken-hearted, in a terrible condition. I tried to protect her, but she was never the same.”
Moments later, lorries left the sq. with their cargo of little kids. “Stenia, along with several hundred other children, and the elderly and sick from the ghetto, were driven 75km to the Kulmhof death camp in Chelmno, 200 miles west of Warsaw,” says creator Kate Reardon. She has helped Renee to put in writing her haunting life story, A Mother’s Promise, by means of the prism of Sala’s extraordinary acts of devotion.
“She kept me safe from 1939 to 45,” says Renee. “It was all God’s wonder and will.”
That she survived to inform her story is a tribute to her mom’s selflessness and heroism.
From invasion to liberation in April 1945, Renee was marched, herded and shoved from ghetto to camp.
But there was one fixed: her mom.
“Every day for nearly six years, mother and daughter were tangled together in hell,” says Kate, who helps Renee all through our interview. “From ghettos to slave labour, they were a powerful source of solace and hope to one another.
“For Renee, the need to share has finally overcome the desire to forget. This is a love letter to a mother 80 years in the making.”
Against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty got here acts of life-enhancing kindness. To shield her, a few of the different survivors helped 13-year-old Renee look older.
“One had a lipstick in her pocket, and another a powder compact. One lady exchanged her high-heeled shoes with my flat ones,” Renee remembers.
She was 15 when she boarded a practice to Auschwitz together with her mother and father.
She writes of making an attempt to “concentrate on the feeling of holding my mother’s hand in mine. It was like holding on to life”.
On arrival, her beloved father Tatus jumped from the practice and was marched out of sight by the SS.
For 80 years, Renee believed her father died within the gasoline chambers. She by no means had an opportunity to say goodbye. Bewildered, Renee and her mom shuffled ahead within the queue for choice, and in direction of the infamous Dr Josef Mengele, who was known as the “angel of death” for his inhumane medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners.
Renee was despatched to the best, to work, and her mom to the left – to die instantly. But Sala crossed the choice line again to Renee’s aspect.
To today, Renee can not fathom how her mom’s transfer went unchecked. “It was like a miracle,” she says. “They must have seen it, there was no way they couldn’t.”
For the following month, the pair survived hunger, beatings and the insufferable chilly earlier than being transported to work in Hamburg. There, by means of the coldest winter of conflict, they labored cleared rubble from bombsites within the Hamburg docks.
“I didn’t even have underwear and my head was bald from where it had been shaved,” remembers Renee. “Nearly every day there were Allied air raids, a godsend which gave us some time to rest in bomb shelters.”
Mother and daughter remained in Ham-burg till April 1945, Sala by no means letting Renee out of her sight. Says Kate: “It was Sala’s constant presence, her hand in Renee’s, that gave her that all important ingredient for survival: hope.”
But shortly earlier than the conflict’s finish, in April, Sala and Renee had been despatched to completely different work websites close to the docks.
Renee remembers: “At the end of the day my mother was offloaded from the train on a stretcher. Her mouth and cheek had been ripped open, she was
in so much pain. I was told she had been working near a slaughterhouse and ‘for fun’ a bull had been let out. My poor gentle mama attacked by a bull. To think of her trampled and torn, there was such wickedness and evil and she lost so much strength.”
Finally, the Allied advance obtained too shut for the Germans to disregard and, in April 1945, Renee and her injured mom had been transported to Bergen-Belsen.
“It’s just impossible to describe the scenes there with skeletons walking,” Renee remembers. “I was so terrified. I held my mother’s hand in mine, hoping it would give her the strength to hold on. Her voice barely above a whisper, she told me, ‘Do not cry when I die’.”
Twelve days after the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, Sala succumbed to her accidents and died. Motherhood had given her the desire to outlive till her daughter was protected. “I didn’t cry, not then. I felt destroyed. My heart was crying, but my eyes were dry,” says Renee.
After the conflict she discovered love with Charles Salt, a British army policeman who was concerned within the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
“We never spoke very much about the conditions in which I lost my mother. We didn’t need to. He had seen it for himself.”
Their marriage lasted 62 years till his demise in December 2011. During the course of writing her ebook, Renee found her father hadn’t died within the gasoline chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, however a focus camp in Bavaria known as Kaufering, weeks earlier than it was liberated by the Americans.
“After 80 years, I finally know what happened to my father after we were ripped apart at Auschwitz. I have closure. Kate took a memorial plaque to Germany and it was put in the place he is buried.”
As for her mom, Renee’s devotion stays as robust right now because it ever did. “I will never forget Mama, or stop speaking her name, for she showed me the most powerful and pure love there is.”
A love with out limits.
A Mother’s Promise by Renee Salt with Kate Thompson (Orion, £20) is out now
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2033942/my-mothers-love-endured-face