Holocaust Letters

Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to hold onto each other through letters. But wartime conditions applied. Letters were censored and could not be sent between countries at war with each other. How to keep in contact? And, once contact was established, what to say — and about what to remain silent? In her presentation, Prof Debórah Dwork will trace how letters became threads stitching loved ones into each other’s constantly changing daily lives.

Edited by Jan Lánícek and Jan Lambertz, More than Parcels explores the horrors of the Holocaust by focusing on the systematic starvation of Jewish civilians confined to Nazi ghettos and camps. The modest relief parcel, often weighing no more than a few pounds and containing food, medicine, and clothing, could extend the lives and health of prisoners. For Jews in occupied Europe, receiving packages simultaneously provided critical emotional sustenance in the face of despair and grief. Placing these parcels front and center in a history of World War II challenges several myths about Nazi rule and Allied responses.

Letters provide insight into their writers, but how much can we learn about them from one letter? This talk examines a Jewish nurse’s letter to her brother from the opening months of the First World War. The letter is replete with allusions to the unfolding military situation on the Eastern Front, but it also offers a glimpse into her own journey of self-discovery – a newly trained nurse, a woman who has realised that she ‘likes working’. The talk will also focus on the challenges of reading correspondence written in archaic German in a near-indecipherable script. How much meaning can we truly recover from textual artefacts that were intended for somebody who knew their author far better than we do?

In The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed.

This event was organised as part of the Holocaust Letters exhibition events series organised by the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership. To mark the end of the One Story Many Voices tour, the Wiener Holocaust Library hosted a panel discussion on Thursday 30th March 2023, called Reverberations and Traces: Using Sound from Letters and Archive Sources.

The Wiener Holocaust Library, in partnership with the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, for the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership and Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations (University of Southampton), were delighted to host this hybrid panel discussion with Prof Shirli Gilbert and Prof Joachim Schlör, led in conversation by Charlie Knight, on letters in Holocaust-related research.