Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery

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 survivors I , by child survivors II , by the children of survivors III 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 [viii] letters from the lost complex promise, nations-like individuals who have survived deep trauma-require the courage to face their pasts.This book is one beginning.

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