✡️ ‘In My Father’s Words’: New Film Recounts Holocaust Survivor’s Testimony 🔌
Weekend Plug-in 🔌
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DALLAS — “How’s your dad doing?”
My friend Anna Salton Eisen, executive producer of the new documentary “In My Father’s Words,” made sure to ask me that when we talked recently.
I couldn’t help but smile at the irony.
For over a quarter-century, the 67-year-old Reform Jewish synagogue founder has worked hard to uncover — and share — the secrets of her own father’s Holocaust experience.
In fact, that’s how we first connected.
In 2004, I met Eisen and her late father when I did a piece about a surprising discovery she made with a fellow Holocaust survivor’s daughter.
Over two decades ago, this was the lede on my Associated Press feature:
SOUTHLAKE, Texas (AP) — In George Lucius Salton’s view, it’s nothing short of a miracle.
His daughter, Anna Eisen, called him at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., with a question that sent his mind racing back 60 years to the hell he survived as a Jewish teenager.
Eisen, named after the grandmother she never knew, wanted to know if her father remembered a man from his native Poland with the last name Waks.
“Ignatz Waks?” Salton replied without hesitation.
Yes, his daughter said.
Of course he remembered him.
“He was my friend and we were together in all 10 concentration camps and then we were liberated and separated,” the 76-year-old told his daughter.
Salton wrote a 2002 autobiography with his daughter titled “The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir.” I still recall how riveted I was when I first read it.
After Salton’s death a decade ago, Eisen’s journey to tell his story — her family’s story — kept going.
A screenshot of Holocaust survivor George Lucius Salton from the new documentary “In My Father’s Words.”
In 2021, 17 years after my first AP feature about the father and daughter, I did another one, this time about Eisen organizing a “reunion” of Holocaust survivors’ children:
WESTLAKE, Texas (AP) — Anna Salton Eisen found the old pictures — wallet-size, black-and-white images of Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust — in a folder her late father, George Lucius Salton, kept most of his life.
The Texas woman recognized the names of some of the teens and young men from stories her father told. For three years, the baby-faced captives lived among the dead and dying in barracks and boxcars as Nazi captors moved them from Poland to France to Germany. The skeletal friends said a tearful Kaddish — a Jewish prayer of mourning — after learning their parents had died in the gas chambers.
But suddenly, the familiar names had faces.
“Seeing the faces of all of them really brought the story to life,” said Eisen, who discovered the photos while moving her mother, Ruth Salton, 99, from Florida to the Dallas area this past summer.
Eisen, 62, said she felt compelled to learn more about the confidants who had meant so much to her father, who died at age 88 in 2016.
I quoted Eisen in a third AP story after a 2022 hostage standoff ended with the FBI killing the pistol-wielding captor at Congregation Beth Israel, the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue that she helped launch:
The recent upsurge in antisemitic rhetoric and actions nationally has intensified both the congregation’s traumatic feelings and its resolve to move forward without fear, said Anna Salton Eisen, a founder of the synagogue and author of books about her parents surviving the Holocaust.
“After the hostage crisis, I’m inspired to go out and try to use this, along with the Holocaust, as an inspiration to fight hate,” Eisen said.
Fast-forward to late last year.
My 81-year-old father, Bob Ross, a retired Church of Christ preacher and Air Force master sergeant, was hospitalized in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with breathing issues.
His heart was not pumping enough blood, causing fluid to accumulate around his lungs and heart. At least that’s my amateur understanding of what was happening.
“Please pray for my dad,” I wrote on Facebook.
Eisen noticed my post. At some point, the two of us realized that the cardiologist who had seen my father was Dr. David Eisen, Anna’s husband.
Photos of George Lucius Salton, top left, and other Holocaust survivors. (Video screenshot)
When my family had a few questions about Dad’s prognosis, Anna Eisen happily handed her phone to the medical professional sitting across from her at the dinner table.
Thus, her reason for asking about my father nearly a year later.
“He’s still dealing with a few breathing issues,” I replied. “But he’s doing great overall.”
• • •
OF COURSE, an update on my dad was not the reason for our latest conversation, although I definitely appreciated her asking.
Instead, I wanted to talk to Eisen and her son, Aaron, about “In My Father’s Words,” a 90-minute film about Salton that will premiere Jan. 24 at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. That’s three days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.
Based on her late father’s book and her own 2022 memoir, “Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the documentary mixes video interviews with Salton in the U.S. and Poland with historic archival footage, pictures and documents.
“We’re hoping to share it with universities, with other Holocaust institutions and museums, with schools and houses of worship,” Anna Eisen said. “It’s a story that is historical but also extremely personal.
“We’re trying to make people realize that this is not some black-and-white photo in a textbook, but this was a real, lived experience,” she added. “We want people to see that this Hitler guy was bad and where antisemitism can lead, not just against Jews but against other populations.”
Aaron Eisen served as producer and his mother, Anna Salton Eisen, as executive producer of “In My Father’s Words,” a new documentary about Holocaust survivor George Lucius Salton. (Photo provided by Anna Salton Eisen)
Aaron Eisen, now 35, was just a boy when I first met him. Salton had flown to Texas for his grandson’s bar mitzvah.
In recent years, Aaron Eisen has joined his mother in seeking to tell Salton’s story. After helping with “Pillar of Salt,” he served as a producer for “In My Father’s Words.”
“For the younger generations, both millennials of which I am a part and also Gen Z, there’s a lot of discussion, and almost resentment, about Holocaust education,” Aaron Eisen said. “It’s this idea that we need to move past the Holocaust or deemphasize the Holocaust because it arouses — particularly in young people in Germany and in the United States — feelings of guilt or shame or things like that.
“But really, the core theme of our project has been intergenerational healing, not intergenerational guilt or blaming the next generations for — if I may — the sins of their fathers and before them,” he added. “It’s to honor the survivors, honor my grandfather and the liberators and share the story of resilience and hope against all odds.”
Liberated at the Wobbelin concentration camp in Germany on May 2, 1945, Salton later served in the same U.S. Army that rescued him.
• • •
WITH AN OFFICIAL PG-13 rating by the Motion Picture Association, “In My Father’s Words” is designed for viewing by teens and adults alike.
Nic Lesmeister, executive pastor of Gateway Church, a megachurch in Southlake, Texas, enjoyed a private screening.
He told me he found the film powerful and moving.
Nic Lesmeister, third from left, and Anna Salton Eisen, fourth from left, pose at the dedication of a neighborhood park near Gateway Church’s Dallas campus that honors Holocaust survivors and others such as freed slaves. (Photo provided by Nic Lesmeister)
“Especially for younger generations, the Holocaust is just this big, round number: 6 million Jews died,” Lesmeister said. “It’s just so distant and unfamiliar when you try to educate a young person about that. It feels so in the past, almost like it wasn’t real.”
But a real story like Salton’s can help bring the history alive, he emphasized.
“Anna’s story is so powerful because you’re actually walking with her father,” the pastor said. “He went to 10 different concentration camps, and he does just a wonderful job of explaining what those experiences were like. It’s so impactful.”
Like Lesmeister, Judy Greenfeld, rabbi cantor of Congregation Beth Israel since 2024, praised “In My Father’s Words.”
“By sharing her father’s Holocaust testimony and her own personal journey,” Greenfeld said in a text message, “Anna challenges us to learn this painful past and wrestle with our responsibility to preserve the historical truth in this time of growing antisemitism.”
Anna Eisen described her goal this way: “We are on a mission to bring my father and his testimony to the troubled world we are living in.”
To request a screening, see her website.
Inside The Godbeat
Michigan voters elected Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a sharp critic of Israel, as the first Muslim American ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Democrat Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor, defeated a Republican incumbent to become Kansas’ first U.S. senator-elect in nearly a century.
Texas voters chose Democrat James Talarico’s progressivism over Republican Ken Paxton’s evangelicalism in that state’s U.S. Senate race.
There you have three of the answers to the midterm election questions I posed in last week’s Plug-in.
For more on Tuesday’s blue wave that saw Democrats take control of both the House and Senate, see “5 Faith Issues That Emerged From The 2026 Midterm Elections” and “Road To 2028: What The Midterms Reveal About The Faith Vote,” both by Religion Unplugged’s Clemente Lisi.
The Final Plug
I’m a journalist, not a politician. I make it a point to be nonpartisan in my reporting.
But I’m also a native Texan. If — in some alternate universe — I ever won at the ballot box, I’d do exactly what the Lone Star State’s newly elected U.S. senator and governor did.
I’d make a late-night trip to Whataburger.
Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 20 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.