I'm having a hard time. I'm feeling sad, because my friend Mary died on Friday morning (May 1, 2026). She was 96 years old and would have been 97 on May 6. I met her through a friend in the early 2000s (the earliest photo I have of her is from 2007, but I'm sure I met her before then). When our mutual friend Rachel died, we became much better friends - we frequently went out to dinner together, we celebrated Hanukkah together, I had her over for Shabbat dinners and for Passover, she belonged to the Ithaca Yacht Club and invited me to go with her to have lunch or dinner and to swim in Lake Cayuga, which is beautiful in the summer.
She was born in 1929 in Vienna, and she remembered when the Nazis took over Austria. Her (non-Jewish) nurse/nanny took her out on the day that Hitler came to the city to boast of his new conquest, and she saw him. Her family fled Austria after the Anschluss (German annexation of Austria) and first went to Italy, and then to Switzerland, where they spent the war years. They came to the US in 1948. One reason she and Rachel were friends was that both of them ended up in Switzerland (they didn't meet there, however) - Rachel's family left Berlin in 1930 and went to Geneva (if I'm recalling correctly).
When Mary came to New York in 1948 she knew no English (although other members had learned some), but she quickly found a job and then in a few months she enrolled in Hunter College. While there she met her husband Gerard. I think they married when she finished Hunter, and they went to the Boston area and lived in Belmont for several years while he was getting his PhD at Harvard. That's where they had their two children.
In 1965 they moved to Ithaca, because her husband was hired by Cornell, and he was one of the people who started the Computer Science Department there. Mary studied German literature at Cornell and finished the coursework for a PhD but decided not to write a thesis. Her husband was an avid sailor but apparently sometimes misjudged the wind on Cayuga Lake and got becalmed late in the afternoon when the wind died down. They joined the Ithaca Yacht Club and I think she was the member in longest-standing. When her husband died in 1995, she remained a member - although at the time women were not permitted to join as individuals (!!), she could still be a member as a widow (the rules got changed at some point later, when a number of women, including Mary, protested).
When I met her she was still working part-time as a travel agent, and she found me tickets to various destinations over the years, including Israel and Estonia. In 2010 I was going to a conference in Tartu, Estonia, and I had no idea how to get there. She arranged for my travel from the US to Israel, then to Latvia for a couple of days, then from there to Tartu for about week, then back to Latvia. I don't quite remember the rest of the itinerary.
She was quite a traveler herself - she'd been to Israel, South Africa (with her husband), all over Europe, Iceland, and maybe to South America. I liked talking to her about all her travels and thinking about places I would like to visit.
She also told me about the fate of her other family members who did not manage to get out of Europe in time, who were murdered by the Nazis. Some fortunately managed quite miraculous escapes, but were not unaffected by their experiences at the hands of the Nazis.
I have a lot of memories of those conversations - I'll try to write more about them.
She had a 90th birthday party at a beautiful restaurant named Danio's on Seneca Lake, and then a 95th birthday party in 2024 at the retirement facility she had bought into but actually never moved into. We talked about how she would celebrate her 100th birthday, but she did not get the chance to do that.
May her memory be for a blessing.
Obituary in the Ithaca Journal -
Mary Salton, 96, of Ithaca, NY, died peacefully at Kendal in Ithaca on May 1, 2026. She was born in Vienna, Austria to Elias and Edith (Gold
Mary spoke in April 2023 with students from Cornell Hillel about her experiences growing up in Vienna, her family's escape, and about the fate of other family members who were not able to leave -
The Cornell Daily Sun - Independent Since 1880.



















