Letters From the Lost (2 page)

Many who read this book will have no personal experience of the Holocaust. We all inherit its history, its unprobed silences. Breaking silence and recovering memory are essential steps for personal healing and for historical truth and reconciliation. The memoirs of Holocaust survivors record wrenching tales of loss and endurance. Because they mostly center on the concentration camps or years of hiding, they can seem far removed from Canada or any of the Allied nations that liberated the survivors. The Waldsteins’ story, though, records the complex legacy of the nation that at once provided haven for them but which erected the immigration restrictions that kept them from saving the rest of their family.

Nations, like individuals, erase those memories too painful to confront. For Canada, the missing bits of memory are like missing tiles in a multicultural mosaic, the jagged empty spaces of “what might have been” if any of the countless lost had been welcomed. “When we forget who we have been, we remain unaware of who we are”—and of who we might yet become. Helen Waldstein Wilkes, to her enormous credit, embraces the complexity of a Canada that has done harm, but which promises “the best of a world still to be brought fully to fruition.” (p. 234) To claim that
complex promise, nations—like individuals who have survived deep trauma—require the courage to face their pasts. This book is one beginning.

Elizabeth Jameson
Calgary, December 2009

H
ISTORY IS BOTH POTENT AND PERSONAL.
Memories of our history hold us together as individuals, as families and as communities. When we forget who we have been, we remain unaware of who we are.

My memory had huge gaps. I had erased much from my consciousness, especially my early years. Forgetting is rarely intentional, but the avoidance of pain is a basic tool of human survival.

My parents had also done a lot of forgetting. It was their way of coping. The details of their trauma had always been a shadowy presence in my life. As I celebrated my 60
^th
birthday, I knew it was time to unravel the mysteries in order to be present in my own life.

We underestimate the storehouse of memory. It holds far more than we imagine, and reading the letters brought to life people I had known and lost. These absent family and friends occupy my thoughts. Occasionally, I have paraphrased or shortened their letters, but otherwise, they are reproduced, translated by me, as they were written, by very real people.

With the exception of one family, I have used the real names of those whose lives intersected with mine. These people matter greatly to me, and I
hope they will see themselves reflected in a positive light with all the high regard in which I hold them. If my memory of events has allowed some details to fall away and others to stand in sharp relief, I beg forgiveness for any unintentional slights or oversights.

I have attempted to share with the reader my own journey into a past of which I knew more than many, yet understood very little. Because we are not and cannot be separate from our history, to learn from it is our only chance of moving beyond it.

I invite you to share in my journey and, in so doing, perhaps to cast light upon your own shadows, explore your own history, and come home to yourself.

T
O THANK ALL WHO HELPED
with this project is a daunting task. I begin with Mary Ungerleider who saw potential in the letters and applied her skill as a film director to shaping the manuscript. Her unflagging support encouraged me to bring this project to fruition. Next, I owe thanks to Margaret Berger who deciphered the seemingly illegible and solved the thorniest of translation problems. To Allison Sullings who reviewed the manuscript through the discriminating lens of a lover of English literature, I extend my gratitude.

I am indebted to Athabasca University Press and especially to Senior Editor Erna Dominey who saw merit in the letters and made them accessible to a broad range of readers. I am indebted also to Adele Ritch for doing the structural editing with consummate skill and intelligence.

For their invaluable suggestions and unhesitating support, I sincerely thank Professor Christopher Friedrichs, Kit Krieger, Dodie Katzenstein, and Herbert Langshur. There are many others whose ideas have strengthened my work and whose help has been invaluable.

Finally, to family and friends whose steadfast support has buoyed me in moments of self-doubt, my gratitude is boundless.

Central Europe, March 15, 1939

…. From Strobnitz to Antwerp:
Edi, Gretl, and Helen cross
Nazi Germany in search of safety

Family Tree

“I cannot remember a time before the box.
My father’s box. … The plain cardboard bottom
has a cheerful red lid.”

I
CANNOT REMEMBER A TIME
before the box. My father’s box. I think it came from Eaton’s Department Store. The plain cardboard bottom has a cheerful red lid. Across its rectangular surface, glide pairs of skaters, children on toboggans, and a father pulling a sled with a Christmas tree. Scattered among the smiling people in bright scarves and mittens are little sprigs of holly, each with its own cluster of red berries.

Why did my father choose this particular box with its playful scenes to house the letters? Did the box represent for him the Canadian ideal of a jingle-bell family dashing through the snow and laughing all the way? Perhaps it reminded him of a childhood happiness forever left behind.

I was barely twenty-two in 1959 when he died. I had just left home for the first time to follow my dreams. For months, I had been immersed in travel, in books, in studies at the Sorbonne. One night in Paris, the telegram arrived.
Father ill. Return immediately.
I did, the next day, but it was too late.

Despite the shock of his death, my one thought was to rescue the box. I do not know what my mother did with my father’s other possessions. Perhaps she
buried him in his one good suit and gave his shirts to a needy neighbour. Perhaps she threw away his small collection of German books, thinking no one would ever read them. She did save the box.

My mother also saved the album. Real memories sometimes fade, but photos have a life of their own. The photo album contains pictures of people in a world that I do not remember. When I was a child, my mother would place the album on a clean tablecloth and leaf through the pages. Sometimes she seemed lost in a world of her own. At other times, speaking in that comfortable German dialect that was then our only language, she would identify the faces and tell me stories.

This is your father’s brother Arnold and his wife Vera on their wedding day. Such a beautiful woman! And so intelligent, just like your uncle Arnold. He was an engineer, but she studied medicine. Imagine how hard it was for a woman in those days to become a doctor!

This is Aunt Martha, your father’s younger sister. Look at those dark curls. Such a beauty! She was still so young when she married Emil Fränkel. And this is their daughter, your cousin Ilserl. You two spent hours playing together. Too bad that we have no pictures of her baby sister Dorly. She was born just before we left Europe.

This is your father’s older sister Else. Your cousin Ilserl was named “Ilse” to honour Else who had been like a second mother to Martha. Here is Else on her wedding day. She married Emil Urbach, a renowned doctor whom people from all over Europe came to consult. Until the Nazis came. Here are the Urbach children, Marianne and Otto. They were a bit older, but they loved to play with you.

As an only child on an isolated farm, I was so lonely that I drank up these words. Living on a farm meant no nearby playmates and my parents had neither a car nor a telephone to bridge the distance. As soon as I turned five, I was finally allowed to go to school to learn my first English words. Until then, the photo album was the thread that linked me to others.

Sometimes even now, I listen enviously as my friends make plans for the holidays.
“What’s important is that the whole family be together,”
they explain.
“Last year we were twenty-four,”
says one.
“My son is bringing his new girlfriend so we’ll be thirty-two at the table,”
says another.
“Do you seat all the cousins together or do you separate them into age groups?”
asks a third.

Wedding, Vera Schick and Arnold Waldstein

Martha Waldstein

Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. I often wondered what it would be like to know your relatives. My known family was always three. For a while, it was five. That was on the farm when my mother’s only sister, Anny, and her husband Ludwig lived with us.

Anny and Ludwig never had children. It was rumoured that she couldn’t because she had worked as an X-ray technician in the early days when the effects of X-ray were not fully understood. I used to urge my parents to have another child. Their response never varied:
“At first we were too scared. You were still a baby when we fled and became strangers in a strange land. We had no money, no skills, and no English. We were afraid. Now it’s too late.”