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March 26, 2010
A real-time history lesson
Helen Waldstein Wilkes’ memoir explores a traumatic past.
TOVA G. KORNFELD
As a child of a survivor of the Holocaust, reading anything about the horror of those days is very difficult for me. However, I am constantly amazed at the stories from new perspectives that continue to emerge years after the fact, as relatives of victims and survivors embark upon personal explorations of family history and grapple with the memories.
Helen Waldstein Wilkes undertook such a journey and penned the remarkable book, Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery, just published by Athabasca University Press. Her experiences resulted in personal epiphanies and a return to her Jewish roots.
Wilkes was born in 1937 in the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, an only child to Edmund and Gretl Waldstein. As antisemitism spread through Europe, Edmund was able to obtain the last visa issued in Prague, on March 15, 1939, that allowed his family to emigrate to Canada as farmers. They were the only ones of their extended family able to leave Europe. The hope was that Edmund would be able to find a way to sponsor the rest of the family to Canada.
On April 16, 1939, the Waldsteins landed in New Brunswick. Their visa had been issued based on a five-year promise to the Canadian government to farm in a rural area in southern Ontario. Life was hard. There were no Jews around. Helen attended a one-room school, where she was viewed as different and taunted for her German-accented English. Antisemitism was a reality even in Canada during that time. The family ultimately became secular and Helen attended the local Sunday school.
Contact with the family members left behind continued through regular letters received from Europe, until 1942, when almost every member was taken to concentration camps. The letters were replete with family news, advice on how to farm, queries regarding Canada and pleas for assistance in getting out of Europe. Many of the letters were penned by Arnold, Edmund’s brother, who was living in Prague. Arnold was an engineer by training and a stoic by personality, as exemplified by his writing. He survived the war and wrote five postwar letters to the family in 1945 and 1946.
In 1946, Helen became aware of a red Eaton’s Christmas box in her father’s bedroom. That box contained all the letters that had come from the family. At the time, she did not realize their significance.
After the war, the family moved to Hamilton and Helen went on to pursue her education: a BA, a master’s and a PhD in French literature and history. In 1959, Helen’s father passed away and she returned to Canada from her studies abroad. She wanted to save the box.
Save it she did – only to put it in storage in her own home. It was not until she turned 60, in 1997, that she took the box out again and realized what a treasure it held. The letters, just by their dates, provide a real-time history lesson. Arnold’s letters had stopped in March 1941. In his five postwar letters, he tells what life was like in Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp of the Nazi war machine, where most of the family was taken. Arnold’s logical and analytical assessment of what was happening around him is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Unfortunately, after surviving the camps, he died in a tragic household accident in 1951.
Wilkes’ original intention was to translate all the letters from German to English, compile them in book form and let the translations speak for themselves. However, several of her colleagues convinced her that without the context of her personal involvement, the book would lack meaning. That advice prompted Wilkes to travel to Europe on three occasions to explore her roots and find out what happened to her family. There, she found different reactions from the locals in the towns she visited to her presence and the questions she asked. Visiting the site of Theresienstadt, she came to better understand the scope of the operation of the “Final Solution.” In Prague, she visited the Jewish Quarter, where she found a memorial with bronze plaques engraved with 77,297 names, one for each of the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. There, in the New Jewish Cemetery, she found Arnold’s grave and wept for the uncle she had never known. She has never been able to bring herself to visit Auschwitz.
The result of her odyssey is a fascinating collection of the letters and assorted photographs, maps and charts woven together by Wilkes’ descriptive narrative.
During an interview with the Independent, Wilkes indicated that all of her family came to life through the letters and that she felt that “if she did not publish them, it would be like killing them again.” The book essentially validates and personalizes the existence of each and every one of her relatives. They are not just numbers on a list of the six million, but rather flesh and blood, with names and hearts and souls. For those who perished in the camps, there are no graves to visit. This book is their memorial.
The penultimate paragraph in the book says it best, “They live on in me, those family members whose lives were so prematurely interrupted. I have inherited something of their essence along with their stories. They flow through me and, to some degree, they shape me.”
Wilkes did not marry Jewish nor raise her two daughters in the Jewish religion but her experiences have led to a return to Judaism; she has come home.
When asked who she thinks should read the book, Wilkes said, “I believe that it will appeal to all age groups, but I would particularly like young people and students to read it, in order for them to gain a better understanding of what happened in Europe – and here in Canada – during those war years.” This latter comment is Wilkes’ reference to Canada’s inaction in providing any assistance to the Jews of Europe before and during the war.
Anyone who writes this type of book will always wonder if justice has been done to the memory of those who perished. Wilkes need not worry on that score.
Wilkes will launch the book on April 10, 7:30 p.m., at Or Shalom, where she will read selections. Admission is free. Wilkes will also speak at the annual Holocaust Day Memorial at the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery, April 11, at noon.
Tova Kornfeld is a local writer and lawyer.
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