George Salton, The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir (2002, repr. 2022)

George Salton’s harrowing Holocaust memoir documents his experiences as part of a slave labor group transported through ten different concentration camps in Europe, which Salton repeatedly characterized as a living instance of Dante’s hell. His grandson, Aaron Eisen, documents the parallels in an essay on his blog, which celebrates the work of his grandfather and his mother Anna Salton Eisen:

“[…] In his unbearable, infernal Holocaust waking nightmare, my grandfather soon has only his brother Manek to turn to, ‘my guide and my protector,’ when his parents face their untimely doom in the gas chambers. ‘God, dear God, You are all powerful and merciful. Save us,’ George prays, as he and Manek are questioned in the Rzeszów ghetto alongside other Jews forced to run, squat, and jump, under the brutal eyes of the Nazis, to demonstrate their fitness as slave laborers. ‘I wondered if maybe in this place, on this day, prayers did not matter,’ George writes. ‘I was in hell. I had just learned what a selection was.’

“My grandfather then has no one he knows with him through the trials of 10 concentration camps. ‘I was alone in the hell of Płaszów,’ he recollects of one camp. Of another, he finds in Dante’s poem a description of what he endures:
‘I was entering the gates of hell. I remembered and understood Dante’s words in my mother’s [copy of his] book: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” A prisoner mumbled that we were in the concentration camp called Ravensbrück.’ […]”    —Aaron Eisen, “Do Not Abandon All Hope: Dante and the Holocaust,” AnnaSaltonEisen.com

For more on the book, originally published in 2002 and reprinted in a 20th-anniversary edition in 2022, see Mandel Vilar Press.

Related Sighting

Jacob Landau, “The Holocaust Suite and Dante’s Inferno”