Yad Vashem Displays Last Letters from Shoah Victims to Loved-Ones

The Fellowship  |  April 29, 2019

Stained with tears, these letters were written right before Holocaust victims perished at the hands of Nazi Germany. In honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on May 2, a handful of last letters will be displayed online by Yad Vashem reports Jewish News.

Among the letters, sisters Susan-Zsuzsa, 9, and Lili Klein, 7, wrote their father Hugo a short letter: “Dear Daddy, We are well – goodbye.”

Hugo was drafted into a forced labor battalion in 1943, leaving his wife Matild behind with their two daughters in Hencida in Hungary.

Hugo survived the war, but Matild, Susan-Zsuzsa and Lili were deported to Auschwitz and were murdered shortly after their arrival.

“At the same time that Paris and Rome in the West and Vilna and Minsk in the East were being liberated from Nazi hands, we see in many of the last letters a glimmer of hope by the writers to be reunited with their loved ones,” says Yad Vashem’s online exhibitions coordinator Yona Kobo.

“They were written 75 years ago on small pieces of paper or the back of postcards, which sometimes are stained with the tears of both  the sender and the recipients.”