Friends of CSI Will Celebrate Spring with Brunch and Tale of Hope 

Staten Island Advance - Sunday, March 30, 2008

Dr. Ann Kirschner, author of "Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story," will be the guest speaker at the Friends of the College of Staten Island (CSI) Annual Spring Literary Brunch, April 13 at 11 a.m. in the Campus Center Park Café. Tickets are $60 ($30 of which is tax-deductible) and will help support student scholarships and programs. Reservations should be made by calling the Advancement Office by Tuesday at 718-982-2365.

Dr. Kirschner -- currently dean of the Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York -- will discuss her book, "Sala's Gift," a personal account of her mother's heroic experiences through seven Nazi labor camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia between 1940 and 1945. Her mother, Sala Garncarz Kirschner, was in her late teens and early 20s at the time, and she succeeded in keeping a cardboard box filled with an account of her experiences, with her throughout the harrowing journeys.

Having kept the box secret for nearly 50 years, Sala decided, just before receiving triple bypass heart surgery, to give the box to her daughter.

Amid the letters, photographs, diary entries, and other documents, Dr. Kirschner found her mother's sense of optimism and will to survive.

Chairs of the event are Beverly Garcia Anderson, first vice president of the Friends of CSI, and Anthony DeFazio, treasurer of the Friends.

The Friends of CSI is an association of community members dedicated to helping the college realize its goals and educational mission.  

Reprinted here with permission from the