Seven Dials pre-empts 95-year-old Holocaust survivor Renee Salt's memoir

Orion imprint Seven Dials has pre-empted the memoir of Renee Salt, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor.

Beth Eynon, editorial director for Seven Dials, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Kate Burke at Blake Friedmann in a pre-emptive offer. US rights have also sold to Alcove Press and Canadian rights at auction to Simon & Schuster. 

A Mother’s Promise will be published by Seven Dials on 13th February 2025 in hardback, e-book and audio. Salt collaborated on the book with Kate Thompson, who she met on the journalist and author’s podcast, “From the Library With Love”.

The publisher said: “Born Rywka Ruchla Berkowicz in Poland in 1929, Renee was just ten when World War II brought horror to her doorstep.  

“Renee tells her story from invasion to liberation, as she was moved from ghetto to camp, Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, with one constant—her mother by her side,” Orion said. “Renee knows she is only alive today because of her mother, and her memoir is a love letter to her, 80 years in the making.”  

Salt was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. After moving to Paris, she met her husband Charles, a military policeman in the British Army and part of the liberating forces at Bergen-Belsen. They married in 1949 and lived in north London, having two children and five grandchildren.  

Salt said: “Having a book published at 95 feels like a great achievement. Nearly 80 years since my liberation from Bergen-Belsen, a place that you can’t imagine even in your worst nightmares, I am finally telling my story in full.  

“It has been a hard but rewarding experience. I had plenty of sleepless nights reliving it, but it was worth it to leave behind a permanent record of my experience of the Holocaust.” 

Thompson said: “Helping a Holocaust survivor to write their story comes with huge and heavy responsibility, but being with Renee is like looking into an abyss and finding a glimmer—a beautiful and vulnerable girl who survived against the odds and, 80 years on from her liberation, now needs to tell her story. Travelling to Poland and Germany to retrace Renee’s footsteps only intensified my admiration for this remarkable woman.” 

Eynon said: “I could not be prouder to be publishing Renee’s memoir here at Seven Dials. Working alongside Kate and Renee on sharing her story has been an honour, and I know readers will be captivated by her life story and her mother’s courage.”