“Veyn nisht ven ikh shtarb. Do not cry when I die.” 

The title of Renee Salt’s upcom­ing mem­oir writ­ten with author Kate Thomp­son, is the last sen­tence that Sala Berkowitz said before she passed away in a makeshift hos­pi­tal just twelve days after she and her daugh­ter, Renee (born Rywka Ruch­la Berkowitz) were lib­er­at­ed from the Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen. Alter­nat­ing between Renee’s own words and Thompson’s nar­ra­tion, Do Not Cry When I Die tells their story. 

One of the most remark­able aspects of Do Not Cry When I Die is that, in addi­tion to exten­sive research, Thomp­son includes excerpts of in-per­son inter­views that she was able to con­duct with liv­ing sur­vivors, such as Salt (nine­ty-five years old at the time of this writ­ing) and George Leit­mann (who, as of today, is nine­ty-nine). So few Euro­pean Jews sur­vived the Holo­caust, and even few­er remain alive today. Do Not Cry pro­vides Salt, one of the remain­ing sur­vivors, with a plat­form to tell her own sto­ry before it’s too late. 

Addi­tion­al­ly — and impor­tant­ly—Do Not Cry allows Thomp­son and Salt the oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss ele­ments of Salt’s Holo­caust expe­ri­ence that are espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant to today’s read­ers. That is, the book takes read­ers through the Berkowitz family’s sto­ry, recount­ing their forced migra­tions from Zduńs­ka Wola, their small town in Poland, to the Łódź Ghet­to, Auschwitz-Birke­nau, a slave-labor fac­to­ry in Ham­burg, Ger­many, to and, final­ly, to Bergen-Belsen. Along the way, Renee’s fam­i­ly shrunk as her lit­tle sis­ter Ste­nia, father, grand­par­ents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all ripped from their family’s arms — lit­er­al­ly, in the case of Ste­nia — and mur­dered by the Nazis. 

Besides recount­ing the per­son­al his­to­ries of Salt and her fam­i­ly mem­bers, Do Not Cry is a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to the genre of Holo­caust mem­oirs because of the ways in which Salt and Thomp­son guide the nar­ra­tive through issues infre­quent­ly men­tioned in the ear­li­er wave of sur­vivor sto­ries. For instance, while due atten­tion is paid to Salt’s expe­ri­ences at Auschwitz-Birke­nau, equal time is devot­ed to the ghet­tos in which the Berkowitz fam­i­ly was impris­oned, includ­ing that in Zduńs­ka Wola, their small town whose Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion was essen­tial­ly wiped out dur­ing the Holo­caust. They do not shy away from dis­cussing top­ics like sex­u­al vio­lence, which ear­li­er sur­vivor accounts rarely mentioned.

Do Not Cry also defies genre norms through its exten­sive explo­ration of post-lib­er­a­tion life, includ­ing the anti-Jew­ish vio­lence that lin­gered in Poland long after the war. Salt, for instance, tried to return to her home­town, but ​“It was awful … We were made to feel so unwel­come, as if peo­ple were dis­ap­point­ed that we’d sur­vived the camps. They didn’t want to see us Jew­ish peo­ple com­ing back. Believe me, the anti­semitism was ter­ri­ble, just ter­ri­ble.” The mem­oir also delves into the long-last­ing phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al trau­ma that sur­vivors like Salt dealt with even after they reached hap­py mile­stones like mar­ry­ing and hav­ing chil­dren. So many Holo­caust mem­oirs end with the lib­er­a­tion of the camps, but Do Not Cry sheds light on the for­got­ten strug­gles that con­tin­ued afterward.