Letters From the Lost Read online

  Letters from the Lost

  OUR LIVES: DIARY, MEMOIR, AND LETTERS

  Series Editor: Janice Dickin

  OUR LIVES aims at both student and general readership.

  Today’s students, living in a world of blogs, understand that there is much to be learned from the everyday lives of everyday people. Our Lives seeks to make available previously unheard voices from the past and present. Social history in general contests the construction of history as the story of elites and the act of making available the lives of everyday people, as seen by themselves, subverts even further the contentions of social historiography. At the same time, Our Lives aims to make available books that are good reads. General readers are guaranteed quality, provided with introductions that they can use to contextualize material and are given a glimpse of other works they might want to look at. It is not usual for university presses to provide this type of primary material. Athabasca University considers provision of this sort of material as important to its role as Canada’s Open University.

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  SERIES TITLES

  A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri by John Leigh Walters

  Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery by Helen Waldstein Wilkes

  Letters from the lost

  A Memoir of Discovery

  HELEN WALDSTEIN WILKES

  © 2010 Helen Waldstein Wilkes

  Published by AU Press, Athabasca University

  1200, 10011 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Waldstein Wilkes, Helen, 1936-

  Letters from the lost : a memoir of discovery / Helen

  Waldstein Wilkes.

  (Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters, 1921-6653)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Also available in electronic format (978-1-897425-54-1).

  ISBN 978-1-897425-53-4

  1. Waldstein Wilkes, Helen, 1936-. 2. Waldstein Wilkes, Helen, 1936- --Family. 3. Jews--Czech Republic--Prague--Biography. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Czech Republic--Personal narratives. 5. Jews--Czech Republic--Prague--Correspondence. 6. Jews--Canada--Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters series (Edmonton, Alta.).

  DS135.C97W35 2010 940.53’1809224371 C2009-906247-X

  Cover design by Sergiy Kozakov.

  Book design by Laura Brady.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing.

  All images unless otherwise credited are courtesy of Helen Waldstein Wilkes.

  This project was funded in part by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

  Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at

  [email protected] for permissions and copyright information.

  A volume in the Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters series:

  ISSN 1921-6653 (Print)

  ISSN 1921-6661 (Online)

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Family Tree

  Opening the Box

  Leaving Home

  Letters to Antwerp

  Starting Over

  Letters to Canada

  Searching In Europe: 1997-1998

  My Aunts and Uncles

  My Grandparents

  War Breaks Out

  The Family Copes

  The Letters Stop

  Imagining

  After the War

  Finding Home

  Searching for Family Again

  Searching for Family One Last Time

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Foreword

  MOVING, SEARING, WRENCHING, INSPIRING—the adjectives that can apply to many memoirs of the Holocaust and the feelings they evoke certainly apply as well to Letters from the Lost. Each personal odyssey is individual, though, and this narrative is distinguished by the individuality of Helen Waldstein Wilkes’ story and the insightful clarity with which she tells it. As she searches for her own history and for the family members who perished after she and her parents escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Wilkes’ difficult return to that past illuminates the terrain of suppressed memory, as well as its costs. “Memories of our history hold us together as individuals,” Wilkes writes, “as families and as communities. When we forget who we have been, we remain unaware of who we are.” (p. vii) For some four decades Wilkes guarded but did not open the box of letters that held fragments and maps of her history. Not until she was past sixty was she ready to begin that journey of recovery. This memoir is the legacy of her search.

  I read these pages as a historian, intrigued by the process of recovering lost memories and historical erasures, and as a Jew, familiar, in much-diluted form, with the process of self-protective selective forgetting. I was born shortly after World War II, nine months after my Dad was mustered out of the U.S. Army. As a child I learned that the Holocaust had happened, but also, my parents insisted, that it had not really touched our family. This childhood fiction was not an uncommon story for Jewish children born in post-war North America. Even for families like my own, who lost no immediate kin, it was rarely true. My father’s family had emigrated to Canada and the United States by 1913; my mother’s grandparents arrived even earlier. My great-grandfather fled the czar’s army, not Hitler’s. But ours was a large, extended family. Numerous cousins remained in Europe, and we may never know how many of them perished. Over three decades after the War ended, my Dad discovered a first cousin he had never known existed, living in Jerusalem, who had somehow survived, hiding in Prague throughout the war.

  My story is not unusual. Nor is my parents’ denial, or perhaps their attempt to shelter their children from a too-painful and too-recent past. The post-war years have, for the survivors, brought the gradual process of remembering, of painful reconstruction, and the inevitable questions about what might have been. This work of memory has generated a dense and varied literature of Holocaust memoirs: by survivorsI, by child survivorsII, by the children of survivorsIII And there is a growing literature of reclamation, of the search for lost family members rarely mentioned, and then cryptically, or in whispers, those who might have been forgotten in time, to protect the next generations from painful memories. Daniel Mendelsohn opened The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million with his childhood experience walking into rooms only to watch elderly relatives burst into tears at the very sight of him, as they remembered the great-uncle he resembled. When they spoke of the family they had lost, they switched to Yiddish, to protect the children.IV

  Each person’s journey into these suppressed pasts has been at once shared and intensely personal, as individual as each life taken, each story lost. Letters from the Lost impressively combines honest self-revelation, moral clarity, and compassion. It is unusual among survivors’ memoirs because Wilkes’ journey is almost without historical parallel. Born in Sudetenland, that portion of Czechoslovakia the Allies ceded to Hitler in April 1938, her family was, according to her father, the last to receive an exit visa that enabled them to leave just days after German troops entered Prague. Even more remarkably, they were among the very few Jews who gained entry to Canada. “Someone was asleep at the switch,” Wilkes surmises, when her aunt and uncle entered Canada through a Canadian Pacific Railway program to recruit farmers. Someone was asleep again when her aunt sponsored Edmund and Gretl Waldstein and little Helen. No one, apparently, realized that they were Jews.

  Both the United States and Canada refused entry to most Jews in the immediate pre-war years. Both had admitted Jews through the early twentieth century. Canada,
unlike the United States, had permitted Jewish agricultural colonies on the prairies. But neither welcomed Jewish immigrants during the 1930s. The United States severely restricted European immigration in 1924, and during the 1930s resisted appeals on behalf of European Jews. Canada separated Jews as a class from others who shared the same citizenship and then quietly restricted Jewish immigration.V Britain, too, closed its doors, and prevented Jewish immigration to Palestine as well.VIAlthough Germany allowed Jews to leave until 1941, few escaped the Holocaust not because they could not leave but because no country would take them. Canadian immigration policy was more generous after the War, and thus most Canadian Holocaust memoirs have been written by survivors who emigrated after years in hiding or in concentration camps.VII

  Letters from the Lost differs from most narratives of the search for lost relatives because Helen Waldstein Wilkes was one of very few children to escape with her parents, and one of even fewer to enter Canada before the formal onset of the War. Her narrative speaks not only to the Holocaust, but also to her difficult transition to Canada as an immigrant Jewish child. The search for her roots, for those who were murdered and the few who survived, also helped unlock how her parents’ experiences, and the memories they had hidden or forgotten, affected her own ability to connect— with people, with Canada, with Judaism. Although most children of survivors carried their parents’ pasts in some ways, each response was particular. Some survivors adamantly held to Orthodox Judaism; others had not been particularly observant before the War and remained so afterward; some abandoned most religious practice in response to a faith that had not prevented the brutality they endured. Their children, like most, grappled in their own ways with Jewish and national identities.

  The first steps toward healing from trauma and violence come with breaking silence. I had a colleague in the early 1980s, one of the first children born to Holocaust survivors, who told me how empowering it was for him to meet with other second-generation survivors, to find people who shared what he had thought were his own personal quirks. “Like what?” I asked him. “Well,” he replied, “we are the only people I know who have all discussed with our spouses which city we will try to meet in if there is another Holocaust.” Like my colleague, Wilkes planned ways to protect her children should another Holocaust separate them. Her personal journey, too, brought her to other second-generation survivors, and to new engagement with Judaism.VIII

  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

  Preface

  HISTORY 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 60th 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.

  Acknowledgements

  TO 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.”

  Opening the Box

  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 il
l. 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.