Snippets of Holocaust history. Portraits of Jewish children pining for their mothers and fathers in Germany. Next month, a select group of teachers will be the first to view a unique collection of 1,000 letters written by, and to, children sent east by parents who hoped to save their young ones from the Nazi menace.
Deborah Dwork, professor of history and founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts, told The Jewish Press that the collection derives from the estate of Elisabeth Luz, who lived in a small town near Zurich, Switzerland during World War II. “When war began,” Dwork said, “civilian postal services ceased between belligerent nations, so what happened was…parents wrote letters to [Luz] in neutral Switzerland, and she copied every letter and sent them on to their children. And children wrote to her, and she copied every letter and sent the letters on to the parents.”
Why Luz? She was in the right place at the right time. A small refugee camp was situated near her town, and the first time she visited it, someone asked her to please write to his wife in Vienna on his behalf. Soon, by word of mouth, Luz became the intermediary between hundreds of Jews who couldn’t write to one another directly.
Luz never married. “When she died,” Dwork said, “her nephew was going through her apartment, sorting out her effects, and he found a suitcase of these letters. He knew my first book on the history of the Holocaust, called Children With a Star, so he wrote to me and said, ‘Would you be interested in these letters?’ and I wrote right back, ‘Absolutely!’”
The Strassler Center is currently curating an online exhibit revolving around these letters – along with translations and teaching material– which it hopes will be ready in 18 months. Dwork herself is writing a book on the letters, to be published in 2018. In the meantime, Sarah Cushman, who is the head of educational programming at the Strassler Center, will be co-running a Summer Holocaust Institute from July 25-29 for 15 middle- and high-school teachers. During its duration, participants will discuss how best to use these letters in teaching about the Holocaust.
The Holocaust has of course long been a subject of instruction at many schools, but these letters are a particularly helpful teaching tool, Dwork said, because “students respond with greatest interest to the life histories of people who were just about their age.”
Said Cushman: “These letters allow students to gain some personal meaning and personal access to the history of the Holocaust. It’s a way for them to interact with people who were actually affected by Nazi anti-Jewish policies so young people can have a sense of what kid of daily impact these policies on young people’s lives.”
