Letters from Prague

Correspondence documenting a Jewish family’s personal history of the Holocaust and World War II. Raya Schapiro and Helga Weinberg found a box of letters among their mother’s effects after her death in 1990. They were written by their grandmother and uncle, trapped in Prague after the Nazi occupation, to the girls’ parents who had escaped to the United States in May, 1939, leaving behind Raya and Helga, who were five and seven years old at the time. The seventy-seven letters reprinted here span a period of two years, during which the Nazis drew an ever-tightening noose of destruction around the Jews of Prague: each letter is followed by notes of explanation and amplification, as well as notes on Nazi laws and official restrictions and the progress of the war. Each letter has a censor’s stamp on it; each envelope bears the still-frightening emblem of the Third Reich. The letters dramatically convey the tension, growing daily, of existence under the Nazis, and their tone becomes increasingly desperate as every avenue of escape reaches a dead end. Praise forLetters from Prague: 1939–1941“This book turns an abstraction into a palpable terror and pity.” —Chicago Tribune“A compelling and personal insight into the horrors of the Holocaust.” —Booklist“As it turned out, the girls escaped only after months of bureaucratic wrangling, while the grandmother and uncle never obtained permission to leave and were deported to the gas chambers at Treblinka and Auschwitz two years later. Collected here is the moving correspondence between the adults in Prague and the girls’ parents in the U.S.” —Publishers Weekly