Last Letters from the Holocaust: 1941

"You too must be strong and patient. One day this too will come to an end… I am writing this just in case I don't survive, but I have a feeling that we will see each other again."

Regina Kandt wrote these words in her last letter to her husband Maximilian and her son Rudy, before she was deported from Belgrade to her death together with her grandson Sasha and her daughter-in-law Eva. 

As soon as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Jews were cruelly persecuted.  What started out as stripping of rights, dispossession, abuse, humiliation and starvation turned, in June 1941, into calculated, systematic and total extermination, in the course of which approximately six million Jews had been murdered by the end of the war.

There are thousands of personal letters in the Yad Vashem Archives, which were sent by Jews – adults and children – to their relatives and friends from their homes, the ghettos and the camps; while fleeing, in hiding and while wandering from place to place.

In this exhibition are nine letters including one that reached its destination only years after they had been penned.  This is the first in a series of online exhibitions about last letters whose writers were all murdered in the Holocaust.

Last Letters from 1941

The letters presented in this exhibition were sent from Poland, Latvia, France, Austria, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Romania.  Some letters were sent to destinations outside Europe, and thus survived.  Each letter, missive and postcard reveals to us the inner world and fate of Jews in the Holocaust.  For many recipients, these were the last greetings from the home and family that they had left behind.   Parting with these letters was wrenching; these were the last messages from their loved ones, which they ultimately chose to give to Yad Vashem for posterity.