No Past Tense

Drawing on over one hundred hours of oral history interviews with Kati and Willi Salcer, D. Z. Stone has crafted a compelling biography of two Holocaust survivors, covering their lives from World War II and the founding of the State of Israel to the turbulent Vietnam War era in the United States. The biography tells the separate yet intertwined life stories of two Czech teenagers who met briefly in a ghetto and then reconnected after the war. It is at once an epic love story and an investigation into the ongoing effects of the Holocaust long after the end of the Second World War. This book is unique both in the story that it tells and the way that it tells it. The Salcers were Czech Jews, whose homes were in the region transferred to Hungary during the war. Willi was sent to a Hungarian Jewish Labor Battalion Mobile Unit before his deportation to the Mauthausen and Gunskirchen concentration camps. Kati was sent to Auschwitz and then to the Lichtenau labor camp. After liberation both returned to their hometowns, and attempted to reclaim their family property and to reunite with one another. Faced with antisemitism stoked by the wartime German occupation, and with the increasingly oppressive Communist regime, the Salcers fled to Mandatory Palestine. Once again, they rebuilt their lives, only to experience economic ruin, to rebuild again, and then to immigrate to the United States where they reconstructed their lives yet again. The willingness of the couple to discuss taboo topics, such as revenge, attempted suicide, fertility issues, and depression, contributes to the uniqueness of the narrative

Art · Future tense · Linguistics · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology · The Holocaust · German History and Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy