Echoes from a lost world

Lost letters from Gideon Levy's grandfather in Prague to his father in Lebanon, on his way to Palestine in 1939. (Levy is a reporter/columnist for Haaretz). His grandfather and grandmother were transported to Terezin on July 9, 1942. His grandfather, Dr. Hugo Loewy, died in Terezin on August 27, 1942, and his grandmother was sent to Treblinka and murdered there on October 22, 1942.

Hugo Loewy’s 1930 Czechoslovak passport. 'I, as you know, am a pessimist, and accordingly I will only believe it when the certificates are in my hand.'

I always find it poignant to read letters from the Holocaust era that have been lost for many decades and finally found, to reveal a world that is so presently alive and vivid in the letters. Letters that speak in the present and the future, which show the hopes of the letter writer. Unfortunately, we know the end of the story that the writer does not yet know.