Irmtrud Wojak | „News about something that never, ever happened“

Adele and Wilhelm Halberstam were among the persecuted German Jews whose children were turned into letters during the National Socialist era. Their lives as refugees in the Netherlands, whose children were able to escape to Chile, can also only be reconstructed through their letters. Like a diary, the letters bear witness to the struggle for survival of two old people against the superior power of the Nazis, from whom they desperately tried to escape.

Adel and Wilhelm’s granddaughter Lore Hepner (picture in header) kept her grandparents‘ letters for decades. Lore was just ten years old at the time of their escape. The last time she saw her grandparents was in Amsterdam. Her parents managed a brief stopover in Amsterdam during their escape before boarding a ship to South America. Their unwanted journey turned into a perilous odyssey, while Adele and Wilhelm Halberstam had to stay behind in Amsterdam.

From the day they left, they wrote around 250 letters to the „Beloved Children“, who disembarked in Chile just two months before the start of the Second World War. They are testimonies to the resistance of people who were brutally torn from their security, but who did not give in and instead fought for their right to life and freedom. They wanted to bear witness to the truth.

PD Dr Irmtrud Wojak is a historian and initiator of the Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum.

An event organised by the Fritz Bauer Forum.