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Tag: letter-writing

Last Letters online exhibit

Last Letters online exhibit

Susan-Zsuzsa and Lili Klein (photo from Yad Vashem via Ashernet)

photo - letter Susan-Zsuzsa and Lili Klein to their father
(photo from Yad Vashem via Ashernet)

On April 13, 1944, sisters Susan-Zsuzsa and Lili Klein (in photo) wrote their father Hugo a short letter: “Dear Daddy, We are well – goodbye.” Hugo had been drafted into a forced labour battalion in 1943; his wife Matild had stayed with their two daughters in their hometown of Hencida in the Bihar district of Hungary. Hugo survived the war, but Matild, Susan-Zsuzsa, 9, and Lili, 7, were deported to Auschwitz on May 24, 1944, and murdered shortly after their arrival.

Exactly 75 years later, Susan-Zsuzsa and Lili’s letter is among a dozen last letters included in Yad Vashem’s latest online exhibition, Last Letters from the Holocaust: 1944, presented to mark Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. Many of the documents included in the exhibition (yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/last-letters/1944/index.asp), as well as the photographs, were donated to Yad Vashem as part of its national Gathering the Fragments campaign. Together with the tens of thousands of Holocaust-era artifacts and artworks in Yad Vashem’s collections, these historical testimonies are due to be conserved and stored in the new Shoah Heritage Collections Centre, part of a new campus being built on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. 

 

 

Format ImagePosted on May 3, 2019May 1, 2019Author Yad Vashem courtesy Edgar AsherCategories IsraelTags history, Holocaust, letter-writing

Letters connected families

A trove of letters between Jewish children and their parents separated by the Second World War and the Holocaust gives insight into the way families communicate in times of crisis.

Debórah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and director of the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts, has been studying the letters. On Nov.  1, she delivered the Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture, an annual event presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel.

During the Second World War, postal service between belligerent or occupied countries ceased, but an individual in neutral Switzerland could convey messages between people in countries on either side of the conflict. Largely by happenstance, Elisabeth Luz, a Swiss woman living outside Zurich, helped many Jewish families maintain contact. After Luz, an unmarried woman who became known to many as “Tante Elisabeth,” had forwarded messages for a few families, word of mouth led to unsolicited requests from children who had been sent to presumed safety in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain.

“News about the aunt who forwarded letters spread quickly and Tante Elisabeth gained many nieces and nephews,” said Dwork. “She soon became their counselor and confidant, although nearly none ever met her.”

“Please pardon us that we write you without having permission to do so,” wrote Robert Hess and his brother. “Adolf is 12 years old and I am 14 years. We live in an OSE [Jewish philanthropic organization] home and have been selected for immigration to America. We write to you because we would like to write to our mother and have no other possibility. Please write our mother that she can write us via you. We must ask our mother permission to travel to America.… Can you also send us a photo of her?” The boys provided their address, their mother’s address in Vienna and a photograph of themselves.

“She did not disappoint,” Dwork said of Luz, “and they were included in that transport to America.”

Although she was poor, Luz sent writing paper, envelopes, international reply coupons and reply-paid postcards to the children and parents.  She transcribed each letter, believing this would reduce the likelihood of attracting the attention of wartime postal censors, and kept the original. After Luz passed away in 1971, the original letters were discovered by her nephew, who passed them along several years later to Dwork, who has written about children’s experiences in the Holocaust.

At the Kristallnacht commemoration, Dwork shared stories and correspondence of several families, including Wilhelm and Adele Halberstam. In 1939, their daughter Kathe and son-in-law Heinrich Hepner obtained visas for themselves and their three children and eventually made their way to Chile.

“Wilhelm and Adele decided not to emigrate,” Dwork said. “They stayed in Amsterdam with their son Albert. Thus began the parents’ long-distance relationship with their daughter and grandchildren, which depended upon letters.… They sought to weave a web of letters, to hold each other tightly and to assure each other that, notwithstanding the pressures of their radically changed circumstances, their relationships endured.”

Adele Halberstam wrote to her daughter: “I really live from letter to letter.”

As the occupation continued, the parents grew increasingly silent about developments at home, mentioning nothing of the expanding repression they were experiencing, including the imposition of the requirement to wear the yellow star.

“Out of consideration for you, I will not allow my pen to overflow with what fills my heart,” the mother wrote her daughter. “Why should you become as sad as I am?”

Regular mail service between Europe and Chile took longer and longer, then eventually ceased. The family came to rely on the Red Cross, which conveyed messages of 25 words or less. This limited means of communication continued after the Halberstams were deported from Amsterdam to the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork.

“The pattern of Adele’s messages remained consistent,” said Dwork. “Little discussion of the hardship, humiliation or fear and always an emphasis on family ties, love and longing.”

Eventually, some truths could not be withheld. An abrupt Red Cross message told the Hepners of Wilhelm Halberstam’s death by heart attack. Adele and Albert were deported to Auschwitz on Nov. 16, 1943. Adele was murdered on arrival. Albert survived until March 1944.

In another case, a son shared with Luz his fears for his parents’ survival, but did not convey that fear in the letter to his parents. In reply, the mother, writing from the Warsaw ghetto, wrote only of her yearning for her children and not of the horrors she was experiencing.

“Her last letter, written in November 1942, said not a word about the mass deportations to Treblinka that the Germans had just unleashed on the ghetto,” said Dwork.

Luz also helped Hanna Ruth Klopstock, another of the children in the care of OSE, correspond with her mother Frieda and brother Werner in Germany. When the girl had not heard from them in some time, she wrote to Luz expressing her fears.

“Every day I tell myself, today I must certainly get a letter from Mutti. And still nothing. I do not know what to think about this silence,” she wrote. “Maybe the letters have been lost. I hope so.”

The girl’s fears were well-founded, said Dwork. By the end of 1942, Werner had been sent to a forced labor camp in Germany, detailed to heavy agricultural work. The mother wrote to Luz: “I foresee nothing good and must hold myself together.” In the letter, Frieda Klopstock thanks Luz for everything she had done and makes a final request that Luz help and console Hanna Ruth when the inevitable occurs.

“Frieda was deported to Auschwitz six weeks later,” said Dwork. Luz and Hanna Ruth learned this news in a letter from Werner, who himself would follow his mother to the death camp a month later. Luz assumed the worst when a letter to Werner in the labor camp was returned with the address crossed out and the words “Zuruck” and “retour, parti” – return to sender, addressee departed – written on the envelope.

In a shocking twist though, Dwork added: “Remarkably, this is not the last sign of life from Werner.”

A postcard from Werner came some time later.

“Written in block letters,” Dwork said, “his message ran, ‘Dear Tante Elisabeth and dear Hanna Ruth, I inform you today that I am healthy and remain here for the future. Sadly, I have no news from you but I hope you are well. For today, very hearty greetings from Werner.’”

The message was just six lines, Dwork noted, not the full 10 permitted.

“What we know now is that the Nazis, too, recognized the importance of letters,” she said.

In his Nuremberg testimony, a Nazi official described the letter program of the Reich Security Main Office. Jews brought to extermination camps were forced, prior to being murdered, to write postcards that were then mailed at long intervals, in order to make it appear as though these senders were still alive. “And thus,” said Dwork, “letters that seemed a sign of life served as markers of death.”

Dwork’s remarks were preceded by a candlelight procession of survivors of the Holocaust. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim, a memorial prayer for the martyrs. Heather Deal, deputy mayor of Vancouver, read a proclamation from the city. Nina Krieger, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced Deal and the keynote speaker. Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Dwork and reflected on his own grandparents’ history of relying on letters from Europe to learn the fate of family left behind.

In his opening remarks to the program, Prof. Chris Friedrichs compared the situation of refugees today, who are fortunate, in many cases, to have access to technology that allows instant communication with loved ones left behind, while also acknowledging parallels across time.

“Nothing we say or do can bring back to life the six million Jews who perished, along with so many millions of others, during the darkest six years of the 20th century,” Friedrichs said. “But now, in the 21st century, the world is still full of desperate human beings longing for rescue or hope. There are things we can do to help bring families together, or to help build bridges of contact and connection. What we learn from the past must ever be our guide for the present and the future.”

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Posted on November 18, 2016November 15, 2016Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags Holocaust, letter-writing

Value in letter-writing

I used to be a father. I still am, and now I’m a grandfather, too. But it’s a load I can handle because the job description is just about identical. It calls for inspiration – of young minds and young hearts, especially of grandkids who live farther away and, therefore, consider themselves relatively safe from my constant inspirational messages.

Despite TV, video games, tablets and smartphones, and an environment humming with electronic messages, we Jews honor and cherish the printed word. We still are the People of the Book. Give us a pencil (or a pen) and a piece of paper, and we’ll find something to say.

So, I write a lot of letters to my grandkids. For still less than 50 cents – it goes up most years (no competition will do that) – you’re able to send a large number of words written on several pieces of paper. And, for a few more cents, a wise grandfather, besides advice and family gossip, can include a candy bar, a stick of gum, a newspaper clipping or a baseball card to lure the young mind into the civilized joy of correspondence. What teacher ever taught successfully without incentives? It’s a trick I learned years ago from the Cracker Jack people. They marketed candy with cheap, fragile toys. I market family pride.

I use wiles of all kinds to encourage my younger kin to rip open their envelopes with frantic enthusiasm. “Wonder what he sent this time? Maybe, if I write back today, he’ll send me another Hershey bar.”

Yes, Hershey bars are great. Nice and flat for mailing, but they have their disadvantages in July, unless you live in Nome and your granddaughter hangs out with her kids in Anchorage.

Kids love letters with or without sweet bonuses. They love their name in big, bold letters on the envelope. They love the ritual of sorting through the mail and throwing the discards on the floor before finding their letter.

And, like I say, I rarely write without including something that is either amusing, edible or ethically fortifying. My favorites are clippings from my local newspaper (human interest stories, we used to call them). So educational! They encourage kids to read and observe the world outside of home and school. If you pick your stories with care, you can package amusement and even morality in your envelopes. For example, I just mailed off to eight grandkids the story of a 65-year-old lady who wrote a confession to her high school principal – she cheated in a high school writing course 47 years ago!

My small audience loved it and marveled at her delayed, but full, confession. They had many questions: “Did she have to take the class over? Did she get a punishment? Did they send her a new report card? I assured them she was not punished and maybe – because of her honesty – they renamed the auditorium in her honor.

But my kids usually award the family Pulitzer Prize to the vignettes I call “Pet Saves Family”: the collie who pulled Jamie out of the river, the cocker spaniel who barked and alerted the family to their smoldering home and, of course, the whole category of dog-finds-missing-child stories. We humans, even after we’ve lost the glow of childhood, still have a soft spot for animal rescue stories. It goes back in history to the gabbling geese who saved Rome. A story probably told in a grandfather’s letter of 300 BCE.

We don’t always need burning homes and swollen rivers. Kids of the right age (say over 3 and under 10) love any animal story. Naturally. They love animals. There’s a kinship there of smallness, innocence, helplessness that we don’t relate to as much when we become older and taller, and more cynical.

Just this month, I mailed out a tearjerker that couldn’t fail to warm the juvenile heart. A two-column report of a three-legged dog – a mutt who had lost a race with a truck and forfeited one of his four limbs – who found a lost child. The sheriff and an army of searchers failed, noted the article, but the dog, with only 75% of its limbs, found the missing child.

The returns from my young readers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this theme. “More!” they cry. They want more. But that’s not so easy. I’m at the mercy of the newspaper industry, which is attracted to war, corruption, crime and disease, rather than the uplifting genre of “pet finds child” or other positive news.

Besides the inspirational value, there’s a selfish payoff to my letter writing campaigns: I like the return mail. And, maybe decades from now, when I’m old and my pen trembles on the paper and my poor old grinders are loose and wobbly, my mail will be full of attentive notes sweetened with easy-to-eat Hershey bars. Bread on the waters, you know.

Ted Roberts is a freelance writer and humorist living in Huntsville, Ala.

Posted on June 17, 2016June 16, 2016Author Ted RobertsCategories Op-EdTags Father’s Day, grandchildren, letter-writing
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