life flashed before my eyes. I rummaged through the debris, overturning bricks, removing iron bars and, sud- denly, I unexpectedly found something — a salt shaker, that was above the oven in our kitchen, emblazoned in blue with the word, ‘“‘Salt.’? If I held the salt shaker, it was a sign they were here; they once existed. A moment before, I thought that no one had existed, no father, no mother, brothers and sisters, neighborhood, Bialystok. RABBI LOWELL S. KRONICK SAM SOLASZ — Everything had disappeared and if that was true, then so had I. I turned my head; someone was watching me. From the demolished buildings people stared, appar- ently Poles, curious as to what a Jew was doing in the area. Probably he came to remove a buried treasure. Their faces conveyed something ominous. I threw the salt shaker in their direction and fled.... FROM DEVASTATION TO TRIUMPH Surely it is a miracle that Sam Solasz is alive today. He could have turned out to be another grim statistic, counted among the six million Jews who perished dur- ing the Holocaust. It is a tribute to his amazing resourcefulness and love of life that he walks the earth while countless others lie buried in unmarked graves. Sam (Mejszl) Solasz was born in Knyszin, on the outskirts of Bialystok, on May 5, 1928. Both his grand- fathers were important religious functionaries in their communities. His mother’s father was the Rabbi of Biala-Podlask, a small town near Lublin. His father’s father served as a sexton in Newark, New Jersey. Rais- ing seven sons and four daughters, Mr. Solasz’s parents were devoted to one another, and observed the tradi- tions of their Jewish faith. Solasz remembers that as a young boy, he accom- panied his father every day into the city of Bialystok to do business there. This 1s how the lad developed a love for it, as well as a cartographer’s knowledge of each street and alley. To this day he often reminisces about his joyous experience as a youngster walking through the “Big City,” alive and bustling, creative and prolific — only to be jolted by the knowledge that the citadel of his youth with which he once had a love affair exists no more. In 1939, during Solasz’s eleventh year, Bialystok became a pawn, moving back and forth between Rus- sian and Nazi hegemony. Under the Russian occupa- tion, Solasz moved from Knyszin to Bialystok. When the Nazi invaders constructed the infamous ghetto in Bialystok in 1941, he returned to Knyszin. Life was fast becoming precarious for every Jew, the Solasz family included. Mr. Solasz often thinks back to November 2, 1942, a day when twenty towns officially surrendered to the Germans. Most of the Jewish inhabitants of these hamlets were rounded up; whole families were separated and placed into trucks carrying them into the cattle cars that would transport them without knowing where on The Bialystoker Memorial Book their final destination to Treblinka, the efficient Nazi death factory sixty miles from Bialystok. Inevitably, sleds pulled up to the Solasz home in Knyszin, herding all of its residents to a transit camp in Bialystok, the port of embarkation for Treblinka. Young Solasz, now fourteen, sensed it was time to steal away or else. So he and a friend climbed onto a truck and hid inside a large rubber tire, out of the ene- my’s sight. In this way he was able for ten months to slip undetected in and out of the Bialystok ghetto, smuggling food inside for the slowly starving prisoners. Outside the ghetto, he posed as a Polish youth. To make this disguise convincing, he wore a cross around his neck. Although hovering between life and death, he was able to fool the Nazis. Mr. Solasz likes to tell how he once saved a Jewish man from certain death. This man, Paul Chorowski from Zabludowa, lived in the Bialystok ghetto. During the day, the Nazis forced him to perform work outside the ghetto near the highway. Whenever Chorowski returned, he would sneak a bit of food inside. One day, when he went to a nearby village to obtain some food, a Polish peasant went to Solasz’s father with the story that peasants had murdered Chorowsk1. ‘“‘As winter began in 1943,” recalled Mr. Solasz, “‘I left the ghetto one day to find some food. Suddenly I saw Chorowski approaching me from a distance, terror all over his face, in imminent danger of being caught by the Nazis. When he saw me, he was overjoyed. He asked how he could sneak back into the ghetto, because the Gestapo was not far behind him. In fact, they had fired several shots and almost captured him. Without hesitation, I told Chorowski he should turn right on to Biala Street and enter the ghetto there. He followed my instructions. Not a minute after he had disappeared, several Gestapo officers came over to me. They were sure I was a Polish boy because of the cross around my neck. In an enraged tone they asked me where the Jew went. I answered that he had turned left. They hurriedly 147