56 hidden letters unearth one woman’s unknowable Holocaust past
Published April 27, 2022
(JWA) – After a career spent telling other people’s stories, Eleanor Reissa has finally uncovered her own. In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to her mother, also a refugee, already living in the United States.
Thirty years later, with her father’s letters as her silent guide, Eleanor goes on a journey, unearthing the unknowable about her family’s past and her own present.
The letters sent Eleanor on a search to retrace her family history in Europe, which she chronicles in her new memoir, The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey.
In this episode of Can We Talk?, Nahanni Rous talks with Eleanor about how her life has been defined by being the daughter of people who lived through the Holocaust.
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