George Salton to tell survivor story during Holocaust Memorial Evening at PB Towers
By MICHELE DARGAN
Palm Beach Daily News
Saturday, April 17, 2010
 Family photo of George Salton, third from left, who will speak Monday at Palm Beach Towers.  George Salton wrote ‘The 23rd Psalm, A Holocaust Memoir’ about his early years in Nazi concentration camps and eventual liberation by U.S. troops in 1945. |
George Salton remembers the sight of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberating him and 49 others from the Wöbbelin concentration camp near Ludwigslust, Germany, on the afternoon of May 2, 1945.
“I was hardly alive,” said Salton, who was 17 at the time. “We didn’t know what was happening in the war until that glorious surprise, the soldiers came in and we were liberated. I remember the glory of seeing the American soldiers; while the German soldiers, who were guarding us, ran away.”
Salton, author of The 23rd Psalm, will speak at a Holocaust Memorial Evening, 7 p.m. Monday at the Cypress Room in the Palm Beach Towers, 44 Cocoanut Row. Also, Sheila Weilheimer will talk about her late husband Richard’s story about surviving the devastation of the Holocaust.
Salton was born and raised in Poland. At 14 years old, Salton and his family were rounded up by the Germans — along with all the Jewish people from the surrounding area — and put in a ghetto, a place where Jews were compelled to live before going to a concentration camp.
Shortly after, the Germans announced there was not enough food or space in the ghetto and people would be taken to work on a large farm in the Ukraine. Out of the 23,000 in the ghetto, they left behind only 1,000, mostly young men. Salton and his brother were allowed to stay. Their parents were selected to go.
“The people were not taken to a farm,” Salton said. “They went to a killing factory. Everybody was killed in a gas chamber, every one of them. I insisted on going with my parents. They insisted I stay. They said I’ll be safer. Did they know something? I don’t know. My brother and I stayed. I was assigned to one work group; my brother assigned to another.”
Eventually, Salton was shipped out of the ghetto, ending up in a total of 10 concentration camps. He never saw his brother again.
Salton, 82, speaks to high schools, universities, churches, synagogues and other groups, not because he wants people to feel sorry for him, but because he wants to use his story as a cautionary tale.
“My main reason for speaking is the warning — ordinary people can be persuaded to push people into gas chambers and to execute men, women and babies,” Salton said. “If you tolerate evil and continue to be silent witnesses, it will happen again.”
Salton, of Palm Beach Gardens, said he is “living the American dream.” He and wife Ruth have three successful grown children and grandchildren. Ruth is president of the North Palm Beach chapter of LEAH (League for the Educational Awareness of the Holocaust) and he is the treasurer.
Hosted by Elizabeth Gordon, Monday’s program will be the season’s last event for the Jewish Women’s Circle of the Palm Beach Jewish Center. The evening is open to the public (men and women) at a cost of $18 and includes a buffet dinner. Call 659-3884 to reserve a spot.
“Hearing the stories of our survivors is crucial especially at a time when history is being rewritten in school books and in movies,” said Hindel Levitin of the Palm Beach Jewish Center. “It’s important that we hear the realities of the horrors of the Holocaust, however painful, from those who experienced it.
“The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, said that the greatest revenge against Hitler is to rebuild the Jewish nation, have large families and educate them in all matters of Judaism,” said Rabbi Zalman Levitin. “Keeping the Torah’s values alive and performing Mitzvot is the greatest honor to our brothers and sisters who perished in the Holocaust.”