Letters from the Lost A Memoir of Discovery

On 15 March 1939, Helen Waldstein’s father snatched his stamped exit visa from a distracted clerk to escape from Prague with his wife and child. As the Nazis closed in on a war-torn Czechoslovakia, only letters from their extended family could reach Canada through the barriers of conflict. The Waldstein family received these letters as they made their lives on a southern Ontario farm, where they learned to be Canadian and forget their Jewish roots. Helen Waldstein read these letters as an adult — this changed everything. As her past refused to keep silent, Helen followed the trail of the letters back to Europe, where she discovered living witnesses who could attest to the letters’ contents. She has here interwoven their stories and her own into a compelling narrative of suffering, survivor guilt, and overcoming intergenerational obstacles when exploring a traumatic past.

About the Author

Since receiving her doctorate in French Literature, Helen Waldstein Wilkes spent thirty years teaching at every level in Canada and in the United States. Her research interests include cross-cultural understanding, language acquisition, and neurolinguistics. Now retired and living in Vancouver, she is actively examining her own cultural inheritance and its impact.

Reviews

Reading the letters, we accompany Wilkes on her journey of discovery. We laugh when she laughs, we despair when she despairs … the courage and dignity of the lost relatives is what remains foremost in the reader’s mind. By allowing us access to a dozen specific individuals, Wilkes has managed to put a human face on an almost unfathomable statistic.

Quill & Quire

A fascinating collection of letters and assorted photographs, maps and charts woven together by Wilkes’ descriptive narrative. … Anyone who writes this type of book will always wonder if justice was done to the memory of those who perished. Wilkes need not worry on that score.

Jewish Independent Review

Strikingly, the post-war correspondence in the collection, a series of five letters written by one of Wilkes’ only surviving relatives, describes life in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, the fates of the individuals whose voices are preserved in the previous correspondence, and his attempts to rebuild his life.

Jewish Book World

Table of Contents

1. Foreword by Elizabeth Jameson
2. Preface
3. Acknowledgements
4. Map
5. Family Tree
6. Opening the Box
7. Leaving Home
8. Letters to Antwerp
9. Starting Over
10. Letters to Canada
11. Searching In Europe: 1997–1998
12. My Aunts and Uncles
13. My Grandparents
14. War Breaks Out
15. The Family Copes
16. The Letters Stop
17. Imagining
18. After the War
19. Finding Home
20. Searching for Family Again
21. Searching for Family One Last Time
22. Epilogue
23. Endnotes / Selected Bibliography / About the Author

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CA). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.