Letters From the Lost
“THESE WORDS, WRITTEN IN 1939 in Arnold’s own hand, cast a long shadow. In 1945, the words are poignant, prescient, and painful beyond belief.
There is no easy bridge between his last letter dated March 10,1941 and his first letter from Prague after Victory in Europe Day, May 8,1945. This time, it was Arnold’s turn to make a new beginning. I cannot imagine how bitter, how hard, or how unbearably painful that beginning must have been. Auschwitz, where Arnold spent the final years of the war, was ...liberated on January 27,1945, but it is almost six months before he takes pen in hand.
FIRST LETTER Prague, July 10, 1945 My Dear Ones, Dearest Edmund and Gretl, my most beloved little Helen, dear Anny and Ludwig, I embrace you and kiss you all with heart and soul as one of the unfortunately few who have stood at the precipice of death and have suffered the torments of the Underworld and yet who, at God’s decree, have returned alive to the old homeland.
Often when in my loneliness, I think back to the recent years with their gruesomeness that surpasses all human measure, indeed surpasses all human imaginings, when I think back to the hundredfold dangers and superhuman deprivations, the countless ravaging diseases and the hundreds of other possibilities for death, when I think of the thousands of my fallen, or rather, my shamefully slaughtered comrades, and the millions of my co-religionists who went to ground in equally obscene ways, when I hold before my eyes the gruesome images of need and desperation that I passed through, then it seems even to me to be unfathomable that a person can endure all this, can withstand all this, and I can do no other than to attribute it to God’s will and to God’s wonder, and not just a wonder, but a chain of wonders whose links reach into one another according to God’s wish and will.MoreLess
There is no easy bridge between his last letter dated March 10,1941 and his first letter from Prague after Victory in Europe Day, May 8,1945. This time, it was Arnold’s turn to make a new beginning. I cannot imagine how bitter, how hard, or how unbearably painful that beginning must have been. Auschwitz, where Arnold spent the final years of the war, was ...liberated on January 27,1945, but it is almost six months before he takes pen in hand.
FIRST LETTER Prague, July 10, 1945 My Dear Ones, Dearest Edmund and Gretl, my most beloved little Helen, dear Anny and Ludwig, I embrace you and kiss you all with heart and soul as one of the unfortunately few who have stood at the precipice of death and have suffered the torments of the Underworld and yet who, at God’s decree, have returned alive to the old homeland.
Often when in my loneliness, I think back to the recent years with their gruesomeness that surpasses all human measure, indeed surpasses all human imaginings, when I think back to the hundredfold dangers and superhuman deprivations, the countless ravaging diseases and the hundreds of other possibilities for death, when I think of the thousands of my fallen, or rather, my shamefully slaughtered comrades, and the millions of my co-religionists who went to ground in equally obscene ways, when I hold before my eyes the gruesome images of need and desperation that I passed through, then it seems even to me to be unfathomable that a person can endure all this, can withstand all this, and I can do no other than to attribute it to God’s will and to God’s wonder, and not just a wonder, but a chain of wonders whose links reach into one another according to God’s wish and will.MoreLess
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