Grandmother’s Haunting Letter from Nazi Holocaust Timely Today

In a letter originally written on bits of toilet paper, the haunting story of Jewish couple trying to stay a step ahead of the Nazis in World War II has been circulated by their grandchildren in Michigan, who hope their story will help others not only survive a tumultuous world, but understand that to say nothing is to be complicit. The fate of Bella Goetz, who wrote the letter, and her husband, Julius, is unknown, but their survivors presume they were on the final train to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in southern Poland.

Bella Goertz penned the letter from a cell in a Budapest, Hungary, prison, where she and her husband had been incarcerated after escaping the ghettos in Poland, only to be given up by someone who had helped them. Written in diary form to her children who had been sent away to safety in America, it is often hopeful that they would one day see one another again.

“This alone, the thought of you, my dear beloved children, this alone kept us going at that time,” Bella Goetz wrote. “And at that time we vowed to each other to hang on as long as our strength would last, not to despair and to keep on going.”

But it is bitter, too, especially toward those who knew of the wickedness of the Third Reich and could have helped Jews escape, but did nothing:

“I never cursed anybody, but then when I was so completely separated from all those I loved, and found myself in prison, I did curse all, especially those who could have helped us so easily to be there with you, and did not do it! May God reckon with them – He will (He did). All the bitter tears that we cry from our aching hearts, so far from you our beloved ones, may they sear their hearts! And you, too, must never, never forgive them!”

The letter, posted by Interlochen Public Radio, took the couple’s daughters, Ilse and Susi, 21 years to translate from German to English “so great was our pain each time we tried,” they wrote.

Isle and her husband, Henry, and their infant son, Steve Adler, had been spirited away in 1939 from Nazi-controlled Vienna, Austria, and resettled in Traverse City. Susi joined them a few months later. They had been sponsored by a Jewish synagogue, and tried to bring their parents, but were unable to do so after the U.S. declared war on Germany on Dec. 11, 1941.

Two of Isle and Henry Adler’s children, Lil and Bob, sat down with IPR’s Morgan Springer, and explained how their grandmother’s letter remains relevant today.

Lil was 13 when she remembers finding among her parents’ possessions a pamphlet titled “Never Again” that showed the atrocities delivered on Jews during the Holocaust. The Adlers had never explained their escape from Europe, but “you knew something had happened,” Lil said.

Knowing she and her family were Jews, she was devastated the photographs in the pamphlet — “not the photographs you’ve all seen of piles of bodies,” she explained. “These are photographs of actual events of torture, where they for example, put a Jew on a seat in a circular pool to see how long it would take a person to freeze to death.”

For Bob, it was a hurtful, bewildering revelation.

“It hits you when you are 12 years old that you could be walking down the street and somebody wants to kill you, who doesn’t even know you, and has no reason to want to kill you other than the fact that you are Jew, or an Indian, or you’re black or fill in the blank —I mean there’s enough hatred to go around toward just about any ethnic group. That more than hurt me, it bewildered me. Why the hell would you want to do that?”

Lil said it is as important that her grandparents’ story live on.

“The Genocide that ... this world has seen over the years — you know, Armenia and Botswana, and now with the Syrians and in our own political dynamic in this country we have, we’re seeing people actually talking about a whole race of people in a negative way. Have we not learned anything?

“I think that that’s important that you learn, as a survivor of such an atrocity, to let people know that you survived, that your parents survived and you can survive in a way where we can pass this on and hopefully one of these days we’re all going to listen to that instead of letting this happen over and over again.”

The featured photo of the remaining barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was taken by Morneomorneo and is licensed under Wikimedia Commons. More than 1 million Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich were believed to have died in the camp’s gas chambers.