Page 100 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

Sally Wasserman with students at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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To Honor and To Remember
When she was eight years old, Sally Wasserman was smuggled out of the Dombrowa Ghetto and hidden by two Polish Righteous Among the Nations, Eva and Mikolaj Turkin. She never saw her father, mother, and little brother again.
After the war, Sally was adopted by her aunt, her mother’s sister, in Canada. It was not until 1998 that she read the last letter her mother wrote to her sister in Canada, from the Dombrowa Ghetto on July 22, 1943, before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sally has shared her feelings about her mother and the contents of this last letter with thousands of students in many settings, including Auschwitz-Birkenau – the very place where her mother and little brother perished.
Sally tells students that before she discovered the letter and visited Poland, she resented her mother. “Why did my mother leave me behind? Why did she only take my little brother with her? Of course I understood my mother had saved me, but when I read the letter and visited the camps and stood in the gas chambers, that was the first time I felt the sacrifice of my mother and her courage and what her decision to give me up must have meant to her.... I no longer have resentment...now I have compassion and empathy for her. She was heroic, so courageous.... She had a strong belief that somehow, somewhere, regardless of the world she lived in there was some goodness. That’s what I like to think.”