Excerpt from Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust
by Anna Salton Eisen and Aaron Eisen
Making Adjustments
On the morning of my return to the United States, I changed my Lufthansa flight with a layover in Frankfurt to a nonstop from Warsaw to Dallas. I felt completely drained and just wanted to get back to my husband, my children, and my life. I couldn’t wait to sleep in my own bed and wake up without dread. I longed for a day without tears. I needed to return to the world of the living and put the past aside for a while. As I made my way through customs and saw my husband and children waiting for me, I could not hold back my tears.
My friends were calling and asking about the trip. It had been both wonderful and terrible, but I couldn’t find the words to explain how this trip had changed my life. One of the best things about it was that I had grown closer to my brothers and parents. We had brought each other comfort and strength and learned to open our hearts to one another.
People repeatedly asked me if we had found closure. That was not why I undertook the journey; I went to excavate our past and locate a truer sense of myself. When I had my photos developed, I spread them out on the bed and looked over what I had captured: a collage of train tracks and concentration camps, of barren synagogues and ovens overflowing with ashes, of surprised faces of the people who lived in my grandparents’ house and didn’t care that their riches came from my family’s ruins.
I resumed my daily activities: took my kids to play dates, stopped at the store to pick up groceries for dinner, chatted with the clerk at the dry cleaner, and waved to a neighbor in the morning as I went out to pick up the newspaper. I fought the constant pull to turn inward and relive the trip to Poland. I swallowed and pushed down the grief that I knew one day would surface. The despair I felt as I stood at the ash pits of Auschwitz and at the empty fields in the Płaszów camp, in my mother’s town and my father’s house, reemerged in the tears that collected in the corners of my eyes.
I cried when I was in the shower and when I drove alone in the car. I went for walks and listened to the same sad Jewish music I had listened to in Poland and hid my eyes behind sunglasses. In my waking and sleeping hours, I could feel my father’s hand in mine as we drove along the train tracks towards Belzec. I clung to the memory of those moments when I stood with my parents and brothers and, in our shared grief, our hearts connected and our pain was carried by the deep and strong love we had for each other. Now I was back in Texas, left to myself to sort and sift through the new pages in my family’s history. I felt like I had as a child: alone with the Holocaust…
Yet I found a new strength and commitment to explore and reveal my Jewish identity. As I was living and raising my children in the Bible Belt, I often resorted to the same strategies my father had relied upon to survive in the ghetto and in the camps. He learned to live “in the middle.” When the prisoners were marched through the camp, they were marched in formations of fives. My father learned to find his way to the middle. In the middle, he was less likely to be hit or pulled out by the brutal guards. In the soup lines, being in the front meant you risked getting the watery broth from the top of the soup barrel; if you ended at the back of the line, you risked that the meager soup would already be gone. Being in the middle was the way to stay alive. Look down, don’t make eye contact, try not to be noticed. This was the way to avoid danger.
During my entire life, I had never worn a Star of David…However, I could no longer live in the middle. I went into a neighborhood jewelry store and asked if they had any necklaces with the Jewish Star of David…They offered to order a charm version from a catalog and sell me a chain to wear it on. In a few days, they called to say that the Magen David had arrived…I would live openly, and even defiantly, as a Jew…I didn’t care anymore if people knew I was Jewish. I had friends who wouldn’t put a mezuzah on their door because their neighbors would then treat them differently…I was disappointed in myself and in the world for making it so hard to be me, so hard to be Jewish…
I made the difficult decision to leave my synagogue and, with a few other Jewish families, formed a new congregation. Though I felt at home in my old synagogue, which was nearly twenty miles away, I wanted to feel at home in my own community. I had been to Poland, a place with many synagogues and no Jews. Now I was in a place with Jews and no synagogue. It was a shanda, the Yiddish word for a shameful thing. If we could sing Hebrew on the streets of Poland, then we were more than ready for Texas.
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Anna Salton Eisen was a founding member and the first president of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. She has conducted extensive research into the Holocaust and spoken on that topic to school and community groups. She served as a docent for the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies (now the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum) and conducted Holocaust survivor interviews for the USC Shoah Foundation. Anna is an Ambassador to #everynamecounts, a digital initiative of the Arolsen Archives, the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. A licensed social worker, Salton Eisen formerly practiced as a therapist, specializing in mental health and trauma. She lives in Westlake, Texas.
Category: On Writing
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