What She Lost or the American Image of Jewish Olkusz 

by Krzysztof Kocjan

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The following is an excerpt from a review on the Polish memorial website devoted to the Jewish residents of Olkusz: 

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"It is (a) fascinating experience to read a book on my home town published on the other side of the globe. It is fascinating to be at a position to verify a picture presented in this book with available historical documents.  The book (by) Melissa W. Hunter, although her action takes place in geographical and historical realities, is also a book about memory.  We see (the) author’s huge desire to recreate a world she did not get to know, had no opportunity to experience, like most of us, although we were born in this city, but not at that time. As she says: "I based my story on an interview I had with my grandmother. During that interview, she told me the names of places I knew little to nothing about—Olkusz, Reichenbach, and the camps she was in. She even had photos in her possession that I thought only belonged to our family. When I was researching Olkusz, the town where she grew up, I discovered not only those same photos online but others as well.  Those photos became inspiration for (one of) my chapters. Discoveries like these were true gems. Also, when I discovered that the satellite camp she had been in (Peterswaldau) was a subcamp of Gross Rosen, which neighbored the town of Reichenbach where she resettled—this was like successfully fitting pieces of a puzzle together.”

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Reading Melissa W. Hunter's book is finally a good reason to think about our own memory, the memory of (not only) our own experiences, but also (those) that (have been) passed down by previous generations. Memory, (the) deficiency of which we feel more and more over the course of our lives, a memory of questions not asked and therefore missed. Memory, which, when not verified, quickly becomes its denial - an idealized untruth. And there is also in this memory the moral dimension of history, which should be a teacher of life and not become – like in Osiecka's poem Orszaki, dworaki – cheap strumpet and even voracious myth. As Hunter says: "What She Lost was a hard book to write, but the scenes that involved Sarah’s mother—where she had to watch helplessly what was happening to her children—were the hardest. I began writing this novel when I was in my twenties. I had just married and didn’t have children. I definitely struggled to infuse the manuscript with the emotion I was hoping to capture. I’ve said this book was meant to be written now, twenty years later, because it took being a mom myself truly to understand what these characters experienced. I shed a lot of tears during the writing of this book, but hopefully I was able to portray depth of emotion as a result.”

It seems to me that I understand what Hunter talks about, because I experienced similar as young father reading terrifying account of Dawid Nassan from Skała near Olkusz10. And despite of all geography, living in other place, with a dramatically different generational heritage separating me from the author of What She Lost, this is an experience which - although it did not touch my family as personally as the family of the author – unites us. The heroine of the book by Melissa W. Hunter, her grandmother, Chaja Sura Waltman passed away on 13 February this year in the United States as Sala Werthaiser, nee Waldmann, at the age of 96.