The survivor

Mania Salinger, 89, spent over four years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She was one of the inspirations for Jodi Picoult’s international 2013 bestseller The Storyteller, which examines the friendship between a former SS guard and the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. Salinger has also written her own memoir, Looking Back (£10, Nelson)

“I met Jodi Picoult’s mother by chance a year and a half ago. She told me that her daughter was writing a novel about the Holocaust and asked if I’d mind being interviewed. So I invited Jodi to stay at my house in Michigan – I had no idea that she was such a famous author – and we spent hours talking about my experiences. I grew up in Radom, central Poland, a happy, spoiled, confident Jewish girl. My life was turned upside down in September 1939, when Germany invaded. I was 15 at the time. By 1942, when I was 18, the mass deportations had begun. On 15 August, my mother, who was in her mid-40s, and my brother, who was just 13, were taken to the gas chambers at Treblinka, north-east of Warsaw. I spent the next four and a half years in camps, including five days at Auschwitz, where I was finally separated from my father. I later found out that he had been shot in a camp at Mathausen, in January 1945. Some of the camps were more bearable than others, but the last one I was taken to, Bergen-Belsen, was truly horrendous, and I became very sick and depressed. I didn’t think I’d survive but then, one morning the Germans were gone. The British army had arrived and we were free. It was 15 April 1945 and by now I was 21.

I wouldn’t say that Jodi’s character, Minka Singer, is me, exactly – I was more outspoken and gutsy; I was brave enough to ask officers to give my father a less punishing job at one of the camps, for example, and optimistic enough to boost the morale of those around me. But a lot of the situations in the book were mine. At school I was a little in love with my German teacher so I never missed classes. It was knowledge of the German language that saved me in the camps, as I was often given office jobs, doing shorthand and typing, rather than having to toil for hours of hard labour. That aspect of my life is central to the experiences of Minka. Still, when I read Jodi’s book, I couldn’t quite believe that the person who lived through those experiences was me. The hardest passages to read were those in Auschwitz. I had to skip some pages; reliving what happened is very depressing. I did ask Jodi to remove some of the most upsetting scenes, and she listened to me. But it’s incredibly important to me to make sure young people know what happened, and to encourage them to live without hatred. That’s why, throughout my life, I have given talks at Holocaust centres and have written my own memoir. I know that many thousands of people will read Jodi’s book. It means a great deal to know that my story will live on.”

The women behind the books