Book - BookDetective

Name: Letters from the Lost

Author: Helen Waldstein Wilkes
Year: 2001
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Genres/categories:
History, Non Fiction
Culture: Canada

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On March 15, 1939, Helen Waldstein's father snatched his stamped exit visa from a distracted clerk to get his wife and child out of Prague. Only letters from the rest of their family could follow as the Nazis closed in. Through the war years, letters arrived at the southern Ontario farm where Helen's small family learned to be Canadian farmers, to speak English, and to forget they were Jewish.

Helen did not notice when the letters stopped coming, but they surfaced intermittently until she couldn't ignore them anymore. Reading the letters changed everything. As her past refused to keep silent, Helen followed the trail of the letters back to Europe to find living witnesses of what the letters related. She has here interwoven their stories and her own in a compelling narrative of suffering and rescue, of survivor guilt, and overcoming intergenerational obstacles to dialogue about a traumatic past.