Background

Norman Salsitz was born on May 6, 1920, in Kolbuszowa, Poland. His birth name was Naftali Saleschutz. Salsitz was the youngest of nine children of Isak, a businessman, and Gela Saleschutz. Except for one brother, his entire family was killed in the Holocaust. Norman Salsitz immigrated to the United States in 1947.

Education

Norman Salsitz was educated in Poland.

Career

Norman Salsitz's hometown was invaded by the Nazis in 1941. He, whose birth name was Naftali Saleschutz, was taken prisoner by the Germans. Salsitz was put in a slave labor battalion, but in October of 1942, he organized an escape group of 55 people and fled to the surrounding forest. Joining the Polish underground, he successfully posed as a Christian with the help of a forged baptismal certificate that a priest gave him. Even among the anti-Nazi fighters, Salsitz could not admit he was Jewish because many Poles were just as anti-Semitic as the Nazis. He finally had to blow his cover by shooting at members of his squad when they intended to attack a Jewish family. Fleeing to Russia, he joined Soviet forces.

As his town, relatives, and friends were successively obliterated by the Holocaust, Norman Salsitz survived by being physically hardy and by assuming a false identity smuggled to him by a sympathetic Polish citizen. He hid his precious photographs in the thatch on barn roofs so that his record of Jewish life might someday be found, if should he not escape the Nazis. Salsitz's wife, Amalie Petranker, suffered similar hardships and terror during the Holocaust years. They met when Salsitz was sent to retrieve top-secret information from her and then shoot her. One of the most improbable stories of love and survival in the twentieth century, the saga of Norman and Amalie Salsitz, provides essential details of Jewish life in Poland before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Immigrating to the United States, the Salsitzes lived in Brooklyn. They then moved to New Jersey in 1956, where Salsitz worked in construction. He would later pursue writing and photography. Salsitz has donated his photographs to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Some of them appear in his books and memoirs, which he and his wife have written together. Salsitz's work intended to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust. It was about not only the heartless extermination of Jews themselves but of the physical evidence of their existence, including their houses where they lived.

In books such as A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, In a World Gone Mad: A Heroic Story of Love, Faith, and Survival, and Three Homelands: Memories of a Jewish Life in Poland, Salsitz recalls the joys and sorrows of growing up Jewish in a small Polish town, the encroaching horrors of the Nazi occupation, the forcible relocation of Jews to ghettos and then concentration camps, and the desperate measures people took to save themselves and their families. Salsitz's histories help to give the photographs more meaning in the context of the Holocaust. He returned to his boyhood home just once, in 2003, during the production of a documentary about his life. Upon entering his small house in Kolbuszowa, he said later, "I looked for my sisters in every room."

Achievements

• Norman Salsitz was well known as a writer and photographer. He was best known for his book about his World War II experiences as a Jewish pretending to be a Christian and fighting in the Polish underground. Additionally, Salsitz was named as a Man of the Year by B'nai B'rith and Israel Bonds.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Three Homelands

    (Compelling recollections of a Jewish boy in a prewar Poli...)

    2002
  • Against All Odds

    (The book tells the story of how these two Polish Jewish p...)

    1990
  • A Jewish Boyhood in Poland

    (Salsitz speaks to us both as an exceptional witness to ev...)

    1992
  • In a World Gone Mad

    (This book is a true account of espionage, murder, shootou...)

    2001

Views

Quotations: "This is why I keep going. We have to tell the world what the German murderers did to us."

"I tell, and I tell, and I write, and I speak. We shouldn't let people forget."

"The irony hasn't escaped me. Because I was sent to destroy the last remnants of Jewish life in the ghetto, I was able to preserve a major record of that life."

Membership

• 

  Magen David Adom , Israel

• Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors , United States

• Bnai Brith , United States

• Hazak , United States

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Amy Hill Hearth: "He was living not just a double life, but a triple life, masquerading as a Christian but also working for the underground while protecting Jewish families any way he could from not just the Germans, but people in the underground who were anti-Jewish."

Interests

• Stamp collecting, coin collecting, photography, antique collecting

Connections

Norman Salsitz married Amalie Petranker, a Hebrew teacher, in 1945. They had a daughter, Esther Cylia Dezube.

Father:

Isak Saleschutz

Mother:

Gela Saleschutz

Sister:

Malcia Salsitz

Wife:

Amalie Petranker

Sister:

Martil Saleschutz

Sister:

Rachel Saleschutz

Sister:

Liba Saleschutz

Daughter:

Esther Cylia Dezube