Letters From the Lost
by Helen Waldstein Wilkes
On March 15, 1939, as Hitler's army rolled into Prague, Helen
Waldstein's father snatched the last exit visa from a distracted clerk
and fled with wife and child. Only letters from the rest of their family
could follow as the Nazis closed in. Through the war years, letters
kept coming to the southern Ontario farm where Helen's small family
learned to speak English, to be Canadian farmers, 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 letters back to Europe to find
living witnesses of what the letters related. She has here interwoven
their stories and her own in an engrossing narrative of suffering and
rescue, survivor guilt and overcoming obstacles to intergenerational
dialogue about a traumatic past.
Waldstein's father snatched the last exit visa from a distracted clerk
and fled with wife and child. Only letters from the rest of their family
could follow as the Nazis closed in. Through the war years, letters
kept coming to the southern Ontario farm where Helen's small family
learned to speak English, to be Canadian farmers, 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 letters back to Europe to find
living witnesses of what the letters related. She has here interwoven
their stories and her own in an engrossing narrative of suffering and
rescue, survivor guilt and overcoming obstacles to intergenerational
dialogue about a traumatic past.