This week, I was given the opportunity to read various letters that were written during the Holocaust, during my Letter Writing class. These letters truly captured the way different people had such similar experiences during this time, and how they all expressed their experiences differently in their letters to their families.
Ida’s Last Letter to Her Sister
The past week, it was very interesting to see how many handwritten letters that prove the devastating reality of the Holocaust and personal experiences that people had within these conditions. I had recently read a letter that was written on October 9th, 1941 from Kishinev Ghetto, Romania. The letter starts off with the quote: “I hoped that we would see each other again, but now I have lost all hope. This expresses the despair of Ida, realizing that her hopes of reunion with her sister Clara may never be fulfilled. There is another quote that uses descriptive language to emphasize the terrible conditions of this time. A quote reads: “You can imagine our situation when we must go such a long way on foot, the weather being so cold, with a small child and with the few things which we will be able to carry along, that is to say, only food for the journey”. In this quote, Ida describes the terrible conditions that they all faced during their forced deportation, highlighting the suffering of her family, especially her little son. In this letter she continues to convey her sorrow and deep emotional pain at the fact that she will never see her sister again, and will be affected by the tragedy of the Holocaust throughout her entire life. This small memoir was a sad reality that millions of Jewish people had to endure.
Similar Experiences, Opposite Letters
This week, I was excited that we got the opportunity to share our letters with a classmate. The letter that my partner shared with me was quite literally the opposite from mine. The letter she read consisted of positive diction and the person writing the letter seemed to be completely okay. He wrote the letter as if his life was under perfect conditions and he did not mention the concentration camps or anything related to the Holocaust. He ended up getting killed shortly after sending this letter. The difference between our letters really made me think about how different people write about similar experiences in different ways. It appeared that this person had no clue it was his last letter to his family, while in my letter, she knew she was writing to her sister for the last time. In my classmates letter, he did not want to worry his family, so he wrote as if everything was okay.
A question I would pose:
How do the different tones in Holocaust letters, like Ida’s despair and another person’s calm, show the different ways that people handled trauma?
All of the letters written during the Holocaust revealed different emotional responses to extreme suffering. Ida’s tone was very somber while other letters seemed more hopeful. It is very interesting to see how different people expressed themselves differently in the tones of their writing, and I am curious to understand why they did so.