Grete Salus

Grete Salus (born June 20, 1910 as Grete Gronner in Böhmisch-Trübau , Austria-Hungary ; † February 2, 1996 in Netanya , Israel ) was a dancer and Jewish contemporary witness of the persecution of the Jews . She left behind a report written in 1945 - one of the first of its kind - of her fate, which was last published in 2005 in an expanded form in Leipzig.

Life

After finishing school, Grete Salus took up dancing, studied for several years at a dance school with Mary Wigman in Dresden until 1928 and later worked as a dance teacher in Prague , where she went with her husband, the doctor Fritz Salus, whom she married in 1934, was warped.

After an attempt to emigrate to India had failed, the couple were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942 , and then to Auschwitz on October 23, 1944 . Fritz Salus was gassed in Auschwitz immediately after his arrival. Grete Salus, together with 500 other women, was transferred to Oederan , to a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp , where she had to do forced labor for the armaments industry.

On April 14, 1945, the women were evacuated and taken by train - in open freight cars and for days without any food, with their original destination Mauthausen - back to Theresienstadt, where they were taken a month later, together with 17,000 other survivors, by the Red Army were released.

After the liberation, Grete Salus first lived in Prague again and entered into a relationship with the concentration camp survivor Francis Lanzer (d. 1956 in Israel), with whom she had a daughter named Nomi (Nomi Bar-Shavit, born September 23, 1947 in Prague). In 1949 Grete Salus moved to Israel, initially with her brother Alfred (Shlomo) Gronner in Kibbutz Ein-Gev near the Syrian border. From 1951 she worked again as a dance teacher in the children and youth village of Hadassim , which mainly welcomed Holocaust orphans. Since 1965 Grete Salus lived in Netanya, where she continued to work as a dance teacher.

Quote

“I'm afraid of people. I am not as afraid of anything as I am of people. "

- Grete Salus

Works

An angel wasn't there. A life against the shadow of Auschwitz. Forum, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-931801-52-7 .
- Excerpt from: Hans Günther Adler , Hermann Langbein , Ella Lingens-Reiner (eds.): Auschwitz. Certificates and reports. 2nd revised edition. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Cologne 1979, ISBN 3-434-00411-4 , pp. 92–98.
- 6th edition, with a foreword to the edition history by Katharina Stengel (= series of publications. 1520). Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2014, ISBN 978-3-8389-0520-4 , pp. 95-100.

Web links

Literature by and about Grete Salus in the catalog of the German National Library
Salus, Grete. In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.

Individual evidence

↑ An angel wasn't there ... , page 41
↑ The first edition of the report, written in 1945, appeared in 1958 under the title A woman tells as issue 36 of the series of publications of the Federal Center for Homeland Service in Bonn; the report was also translated into Hebrew by Leah Alon.
↑ according to the version of the Federal Central Office 1958

personal data
SURNAME	Salus, Grete
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Gronner, Grete (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Czech dancer and contemporary witness of the persecution of the Jews
DATE OF BIRTH	June 20, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bohemian Trübau , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH	February 2, 1996
Place of death	Netanya , Israel

[1] An angel wasn't there ... , page 41

[2] The first edition of the report, written in 1945, appeared in 1958 under the title A woman tells as issue 36 of the series of publications of the Federal Center for Homeland Service in Bonn; the report was also translated into Hebrew by Leah Alon.

[3] rding to the version of the Federal Central Office 1958