Maybe the Auschwitz Museum?
Thanks for your kind words, commasense. As I told you in my emails, the work was a pleasure and a labor of love for me. It is the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on and I thank you for sharing some of your family’s moving history with me. I would be delighted and humbled if the finished work went to a university, but I’m mostly glad about the fact that the authors of the letters, your mom and your aunt, will see it :).
I’m looking forward to your mail, and thanks again.
Great job, EH
If it’s appropriate to share, what were some of the more interesting things that were revealed in the letters?
On its face, the story is not very dramatic – nothing like Anne Frank, for instance – and the letters themselves are the mostly mundane writings of two little girls: the weather, going to school, gathering strawberries, what they got for holiday presents, and so on.
The more remarkable aspects can only be understood from outside the text of the letters. For instance, in spring 1941 my mother writes, “We aren’t going to school anymore,” but doesn’t explain why. But she had told my sister and me, when we were young, that once the authorities in Luxembourg required the school children to sieg heil, my grandparents took their daughters out of school and taught them at home.
The most amazing aspect of the story is that for two years my grandparents somehow kept my mother and aunt from feeling that they were in danger. We may never know exactly how my grandfather arranged to get his family out of Germany after the war had already started, stay in Luxembourg for two years, and then get passage on one of the few ships that transported Jews to the U.S. in 1941. But somehow he and his wife did it, and did it without emotionally scarring their children. My mother and aunt are two of the most positive, upbeat, and optimistic people you will ever meet.
Once I have shared the book with my family, we will decide how public we want to make it. Thanks for your interest.