Background

About the website “Testimony in Letters.”

Way back in 1937 we had moved from Glogau to Berlin, among other reasons to try and find a country that we could immigrate to from Germany. An attempt in 1937 to get me adopted in America had been turned down with the remark, that I was too unattractive in the photo we had send in. Nobody would take me. So that was that.

October 1938 I applied for Youth-Aliyah and went for a month on a preparation camp, but was turned down because of underweight. I was small for my age and weighed 35 kg.

In March 1939 I was accepted to go with a Kindertransport to Scotland. When I left home I was 15 years old. An extensive exchange of letters started and carried on right up to the time my parents were deported to Theresienstadt in October 1942.

While little else of my possessions from those long ago days survived, the letters are still with me. I had kept them in little box until my first husband punched holes into them and stuck them into a file. After we separated they were among a handful of personal belongings he returned to me.

Every time I just looked at them even without reading them, I started to cry. My husband gave them to my brother for safe keep and when he returned them, they were kept hidden from me for ages.

In the early 80^th , when already a grandmother, I finally managed to go to university and got my BA in Sociology and Education. I felt that I had matured and ask for the letters. When I reread them for the first time after decades, I was struck by the beauty of them, the loving care that came through in every single one of them. I suddenly realized what a treasure they are.

There are letters from my mother Else and my father Arno from Berlin as well as letters from my grandmother Bertha and my uncle Emil in Portugal, all of them in old style German handwriting. I felt that they were too precious to be just lying about. I wanted others to be able to share them with me.

I looked for somebody to transcribe them for me. I found people who could use the computer, a rare exception in those days, but they could not decipher the handwriting, while older people could, but they did not know to use a computer. My husband had just acquired our first PC. (Mean while I am using my 4^th) Left with no other choice I sat down and transcribed them painstakingly by myself. I cried a lot while doing that.

As none of the letters that I had written home existed any more, it was a one-way correspondence. I decided to turn this treasure into a manuscript by adding the information necessary to make it a complete story. Econ published it in 1995 as a book. “Auf Wiedersehen in unserem Land.“

Recently I was approached by Yad Vashem and asked if I would pass the letters on to their museum that is in planning.

I discussed it with my son who suddenly woke up to the fact that these letters are precious family relics. But as they are written in German in an old style handwriting, the question remained, who within my extended family, all of whom are either Hebrew or English speaking, will ever be able to read them.

That is how the idea was born, before handing them over to Yad Vashem, to put them on the web, as a joint effort together with my son Danny. To begin with, he scanned the by now fading letters one by one. We then put them into an album and fleshed it out with a few pictures. For the sake of the English reader I added a short summery to each letter.

Now you are able to share with me and see for yourself the letters in the original.

These letters are a real time Testimony in Letters of a Jewish Family, who until the end believed in the survival of Humanity.

Ester Golan Jerusalem 2001