Bergen-Belsen camp (archives)
Photo: AP
Shoah victims' last letters to be displayed
Notes written by Jews bidding farewell to their loved ones during Holocaust to be presented next week at Ghetto Fighters' Museum
The Ghetto Fighters' Museum will display next week a collection of last letters written by Jews to their loved ones during the Holocaust.
"The camp is at the stage of extermination. Every night, drunk soldiers arrive to hit us with wooden sticks," wrote a Jewish man at the Pustkow concentration camp in Poland in a note he tossed through the barbed-wire fence in the hopes that it would reach his parents.
Some of the letters were thrown out of train wagons, some were smuggled out of concentrations camps, and others were kept by Christian neighbors.
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"My body is black from signs of beating, like burnt wood… We are fighting to get a crumb, or even a few leaves… I'm bidding farewell to all of you, my dear mother, my dear father, my sisters and brothers. And I'm crying."
Local farmers who found the note handed it over to the man's family.
Another letter, written by Raya Lubetzky to her sister Riva, was found torn and was glued together by the sister. "Riva'le – the end," wrote Raya. "We'll meet one day, and if we don't, do not forget that we had a father and a brother and we share the same fate."
The letters were discovered by archivist Yossi Shavit, who collected them to create a spine-chilling memorial album.
"The letters are all accompanied by the same tone," he says. "It's clear to the letter's writer that his fate has been determined, and all that is left for him is to say goodbye to his relatives."
The collection also includes a diary written in German by Efi Arnold and his friend Hans Horowitz in 1944 at the Bergen-Belsen camp. The two were forced to burn bodies, and their experiences are described along with songs written on pages which were hidden under a stone at the camp.
