Renata Polt

In 1938, weeks before Nazi Germany moved in on the Sudetenland, Henriette Pollatschek's son Friedrich and his wife and children hastily fled Czechoslovakia for Switzerland, and then to Cuba and ultimately the United States. This book consists of letters (mostly) sent by Henriette to Friedrich and his family after they left, along with annotations by Friedrich's daughter, Henriette's granddaughter Renata.

I think Renata's annotations are almost more valuable than the documents themselves, as they go a long way towards showing why Jews were reluctant to emigrate from Nazi Europe -- and why, once they changed their minds, they weren't able to.

Henriette was a 69-year-old widow in 1938, and a loving mother and grandmother. She enjoyed her life in Prague and felt safe there, and when Friedrich felt Hitler breathing on his neck and decided to get going while the getting was good, Henriette actually believed he was clinically paranoid and might benefit from psychiatric attention.

After all, as Renata says, "No one expects a Holocaust."

There were a myriad of Perfectly Good Reasons why Henriette didn't want to emigrate: she was an old woman, the tropical climate of Cuba (where Friedrich et al stayed for years while waiting for permission to move to the US) might be bad for her health, her daughter Lene was still in Prague and didn't want to emigrate either, she'd have to leave all her money and belongings behind and would be a burden on Friedrich et al for years, and so on.

Over the next few years, step by tiny step, life became less and less liveable for Jews in Czechoslovakia. New restrictions were published nearly every day, from major ones like residency restrictions barring Jews from moving into vacant apartments (they could only move in with other Jews) to petty ones that more or less outlawed fun (Jews were prohibited even from going anywhere near the river, lest they might enjoy the view or the cool breeze or something).

Emigration started to seem so much better by comparison, but Henriette ran into the Kafkaesque situation faced by so many Jewish would-be emigres from Nazi Europe. The system was designed to string people along for as long as possible and wring them dry of everything they possessed and then, in the end, not them leave after all. Like, you couldn't obtain a visa unless you had this document or that one, and you couldn't get these documents unless you had ship tickets, which were impossible to get without a visa, and all the ships were overbooked for months anyway.

Henriette Pollatschek died in Treblinka in 1942. The letters she left behind detail the last gasps of a people being slowly strangled.… (lisätietoja)