The Shoah from being distorted, abused, trivialized, and undermined by blatant lies, memory must time and time again mobilize its collected arsenal of witnesses and documents, to fortify the loosening ground beneath it. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir is one of those testimonies, which in its remarkable sense of detail and unfailing human spirit manages to do just that."--Göran Rosenberg, author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, a winner of the 2012 August Prize, annual Swedish literary prize for the best book of the year.
“This powerful memoir articulates the daily life of a Jew enslaved by the Nazis and forced to do their bidding and obey their every whim in a series of concentration camps. The graphic description of the slave’s miserable condition is counterpointed to the hope of liberation….an account of the triumph of hope over hatred.” –Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Emeritus Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, Editor of The Jewish Street: The City and Modern Jewish Writing, An Anthology
“This is a book to be read and passed down to our children to read."--Miles Lerman, Holocaust survivor and a founding father of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"This memoir is among the best I have read ... a must read that belongs in most libraries [for] high school to adult readers." --Martin Goldberg, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter
This new and expanded Twentieth Anniversary Edition of the Holocaust memoir of George Salton (then Lucjan Salzman) gives readers a personal and powerful account of his survival through one of the darkest periods in human history. With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. The author takes the reader back in time as he reveals in vivid and engrossing details the painful memories of life in his childhood town during Nazi occupation, the forced march before his jeering and cold-eyed former friends and neighbors as they are driven from their homes into the crowded and terrible conditions in the Rzeszow ghetto, and the heart-wrenching memory of his final farewell as he is separated from his parents who would be sent in boxcars to the Belzec extermination camp. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France. George recounts the agonizing and excruciating details of what it was like to barely survive the rollcalls, selections, beatings, hunger, and despair he both endured and witnessed. Of the 465 Jewish prisoners with him in the labor group in the Rzeszów ghetto in 1942, less than 50 were alive when the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberated the Wobbelin concentration camp on the afternoon of May 2, 1945.
The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir
George Salton survived ten Nazi concentration camps and emigrated to the United States in 1948. Serving in the U.S. Army as an electronics technician for the Air Force, he met the love of his life, Ruth, also a Holocaust survivor. They married and raised three children, Henry, Alan, and Anna. At evening college classes, he earned a B.A. degree in physics and a MA. degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University and had a distinguished career with the Department of Defense becoming Director of Defense Communications at the Pentagon. After 35 years of government service, George became an executive in the aerospace industry. Upon retirement, George became a noted author and speaker about is Holocaust experiences. In 2002 George and his daughter, Anna co-wrote his bestselling memoir, The 23rd Psalm. He died after a sudden illness at the age of 88 on March 13, 2016.
Anna Salton Eisen grew up in a home where her parents’ Holocaust experiences were a well-kept secret. Later moving to Texas, she became a founding member of the first synagogue in her area. Serving as a docent for the Dallas Holocaust Museum and an interviewer for the Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Salton Eisen continued to search for information about her family’s survival and destruction in the Holocaust. Anna is also author of the forthcoming memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life Growing Up in the Shadow of the Holocaust and the subject of a forthcoming new documentary film about her father’s life. Salton Eisen and her family reside in Westlake, Texas.
"A powerful, searing recollection of the past, telling George Salton's story with a fierce integrity that is th both descriptive and introspective."—Michael Berenbaum, author of The World Must Know