All these long years later still the Holocaust memoirs come. In the UK, Orion imprint Seven Dials pre-empted the memoir of Renee Salt, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Beth Eynon, editorial director for Seven Dials, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Kate Burke at Blake Friedmann in a pre-emptive offer. US rights have also sold to Alcove Press and Canadian rights at auction to Simon & Schuster.
Entitled A Mother’s Promise, the book has been written with journalist and author Kate Thompson, who she met on Thompson’s podcast, “From the Library With Love”.
The publisher said: “Born Rywka Ruchla Berkowicz in Poland in 1929, Renee was just ten when World War II brought horror to her doorstep. Renee tells her story from invasion to liberation, as she was moved from ghetto to camp, Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, with one constant—her mother by her side. Renee knows she is only alive today because of her mother, and her memoir is a love letter to her, 80 years in the making.”
Salt said: “Having a book published at 95 feels like a great achievement. Nearly 80 years since my liberation from Bergen-Belsen, a place that you can’t imagine even in your worst nightmares, I am finally telling my story in full.
“It has been a hard but rewarding experience. I had plenty of sleepless nights reliving it, but it was worth it to leave behind a permanent record of my experience of the Holocaust.”
Thompson said: “Helping a Holocaust survivor to write their story comes with huge and heavy responsibility, but being with Renee is like looking into an abyss and finding a glimmer—a beautiful and vulnerable girl who survived against the odds and, 80 years on from her liberation, now needs to tell her story. Travelling to Poland and Germany to retrace Renee’s footsteps only intensified my admiration for this remarkable woman.”
Eynon said: “I could not be prouder to be publishing Renee’s memoir here at Seven Dials. Working alongside Kate and Renee on sharing her story has been an honour, and I know readers will be captivated by her life story and her mother’s courage.”