Salus, Grete (1910-1995): concentration camp poems

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Bookmark:http://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb1556-wl1237

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Collection of typescript poems of Grete Salus, written whilst in the camps of Terezin, Auschwitz and Oederan.

Administrative / Biographical History

Grete Salus, nee Gronner, was born in 1910 in Böhmisch-Trübau, today Ceskà Trebovà, Czech Republic. After schooling she studied at a dance school in Dresden. She moved to Prague with her husband, Dr Fritz Salus, with whom she married in 1934, and taught dance. They were both deported first to Theresienstadt, 1942, then to Auschwitz, 1944. Fritz was murdered shortly after arrival in Auschwitz as Grete discovered after her liberation. She was taken along with 500 other women to Oederan in Saxony, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, where the women were forced into slave labour in the armaments and and building industries. She was evacuated in April 1945 and returned by train to Theresienstadt, where along with 17,000 other survivors she was liberated by the Red Army.

She returned to Prague for a few years after the war. In 1949, having given birth to her daughter, Nomi, she emigrated to Israel where she ended up working as a choreographer and gymnastics teacher at a home for orphans from the Holocaust. She died in 1995.