Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust

In Pillar of Salt, Anna Salmon Eisen's father breaks a lifetime of silence about the Holocaust as they journey together to the small Polish town he lived in during Nazi occupation, visit his childhood home, return to the ghetto where he experienced his first selection and said his final farewell to his parents before they were sent in a boxcar to a death camp. They then travel across the Polish countryside checkered with concentration camps and Holocaust memorials.This book differs from other second-generation memoirs because the author was able, at her father's side, to understand her legacy and help him heal from the traumatic past, including saying the Jewish prayer of Kaddish with him the place where his parents were killed in a gas chamber. Anna then returns to her life with a new understanding of her identity shaped under the shadow of the Holocaust.