Bertha Ferderber-Salz

Bertha Ferderber-Salz, née Frost, was born to a Jewish family in the small town of Kolbuszowa, Poland. During World War I, her family moved to Austria, where she learned to speak fluent German. At age 16, she moved to Kraków to attend a business high school. After graduating, she worked as a bookkeeper until getting married in 1929. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in World War II, she hid in the countryside with her two daughters and secured a hiding place for them with a Polish Catholic woman. She then joined her husband in the Kraków ghetto. From there, she was deported to various concentration camps: Plaszow, where her husband was murdered because of his poor health; Auschwitz; and finally Bergen-Belsen. After the camp was liberated in 1945, Bertha had to fight to regain custody of her children as well as that of her two surviving nephews. None of her other family members were still alive. She and her daughters emigrated to the USA, settling in New York City. In 1948, she married David Salz, a childhood friend. Bertha spoke publicly about the Holocaust at various schools, primarily at Brooklyn College. She also volunteered at the Center for Holocaust Studies, translating the testimonies of other Holocaust survivors into English. In 1985, the Center awarded her a medal for her efforts. According to her daughter Rachel Garfunkel, after their arrival in the USA, Bertha was still debilitated from her time in the camps and unable to go to work immediately. In order to support herself and her children, she began to submit autobiographical and fictional stories to various Yiddish language newspapers and magazines. In 1965, her memoir Un di zun hot geshaynt was published in Tel Aviv in the original Yiddish. It was subsequently translated into Hebrew and adapted into a play. The English translation, And the Sun Kept Shining, was published in the USA in 1980.