NO PAST TENSE
LOVE AND SURVIVAL IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST
by D.Z. Stone
Based on testimony by William and Katarina Salcer
No Past Tense: Love and Survival in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell; October 16, 2019, Hardcover, Paperback, and eBook; 288 pages, 30 black/white photos) is the dual biography of Katarina (Kati) Kellner and William (Willi) Salcer, two Czech Jews who as teenagers were swept up by the Holocaust in Hungary and survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen, respectively. A love story at its core, the book's publication date was the Salcers’ wedding anniversary, October 16th.
Kati and Willi Salcer never told their son Ron that they had been in concentration camps. No Past Tense began when Ron, realizing something had happened to his parents during the war, finally convinced them to interview for the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1996.
The Salcers thought the Shoah tapes would satisfy their son. Even though watching the tapes devastated and angered Ron, his parent’s interviews only made him want to know more. He enlisted D.Z. Stone, a journalist, documentarian and writer specifically trained in cultural anthropology to chronicle their life stories.
Primarily based on more than 100 hours of interviews conducted in 1999, No Past Tense covers the Salcers’ entire lives, from childhoods in Czechoslovakia to liberation from the camps, a return to their hometowns after the war, and from pre-State Israel to New York City.
The book not only tells the personal story of survival and resilience—the Salcers’ story should be required reading for anyone seeking to overcome personal challenges—it also touches on many significant currents in World War II and postwar Jewish history, revealing significant tensions, political realities, contradictions, and challenges.
Unique for Holocaust memoir, No Past Tense weaves in the Salcers’ real time voices as if they are watching a documentary about themselves, a structure that provides a distinctive ‘whole life’ view of the Holocaust. Their ongoing dialogue running parallel over a nonfiction narrative account is a particularly modern style that many younger people find immediately relatable and accessible.
No Past Tense is a love story, survival story, European story, Jewish story, Israeli story, American story, war story – and, of course, a Holocaust story.