Holocaust survivor George Lucius Salton lived through ten concentration camps, the deaths of his mother and father to the Nazis and the still unknown fate of his brother—whom he hasn’t heard from since the last time they saw each other in a concentration camp.
On Nov. 1, Salton shared his experiences with the USFSP community.
Salton was 14 years old when German soldiers took over his small town in Poland. He said the Germans made it “legal and official” that Jews were considered “less than fully human.” He described the Jews as “people with dreams and loves who were sent to prison, forbidden to work or go to school. They were executed for no reason, with no investigation.”
“Within months of the occupation, this challenged my fundamental beliefs of human beings,” Salton said.
The town’s synagogue was vandalized and copies of the Torah were burned in the street. Devoid of reason, German soldiers shot and killed Jews in plain sight.
“Resistance was suicide,” he said.
The German soldiers forced all Jews to live in crowded ghettos, only allowing them to bring valuables they could carry.
The rule of the ghetto: any Jews caught outside the gates would be shot on site.
Life continued as normal outside the ghetto. People worked and went to the movies. Inside the ghettos, starvation was part of daily life. People spent every day wondering what would happen next.
One day the Germans shipped Jews to work on a farm in Ukraine. Salton’s parents were sent by train along with thousands of others whom were not seen as “young and fit” to remain behind to work for German companies. Those trains never made it to that Ukraine farm. Instead, they were on a death march.
Salton teared up while sharing the last moments he spent with his mother and father. Upon saying goodbye, his mother said to him, “If you have to grow up without me, promise me that you’ll grow up to be a good person,” he said.
He never saw his parents again. Not long after, he and his brother were separated. He said he felt “forgotten and forsaken” and what sustained him was that he “lived until tomorrow.”
After three years, something unexpected happened—“a wonderful surprise,” he said. After a train failed to show up to take his group to the death march, they returned to camp. Then they heard a stampede and saw American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. They were liberated. The war ended five days later.
“A country that was civilized created an industrial program to murder millions of people,” Salton said. “Ordinary men spent their working hours killing other people’s children.” Salton said it is a scar on the fabric of human culture.
He moved to the U.S. at age 17 with a fifth grade education. He said he felt like he was an old man because of all the things he’d seen, and felt he had no future. He held himself to the promise he made to his mother. He went on to college, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He now says “life is great, life is wonderful.”
“His story was sad, but I was impressed with his resilience to live with love and not hate,” said Jaclyn Cayavec, junior journalism major.
Salton’s book “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir” was published 2009.
