The Letters She Never Wrote

On Holocaust survival, inherited silence, and the words that might have helped

Dear Nana Fela,

I’ve never written you a letter before. You died before I was born, which makes that understandable, and yet, today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it feels necessary. You were my grandmother. They gave me your name. And though you weren’t there, it still feels right to call you Nana, the name we grew up using whenever we asked about you, always with a slight catch in our voices for what might have been.

Fela and Murray Schwartzbaum, my maternal grandparents

I know you through the few photographs that exist, the ones that have lived in frames in our home for decades. Photos taken before you were a mother. Before you were a grandmother. Before the nightmares took hold.

Though that isn’t entirely true. The nightmares were already there. They were aboard the ship that carried you to America.

In Poland, you were the youngest of eleven children (a happy girl, I’m told) until your home in Łódź became the Łódź Ghetto. The misery and terror you witnessed there, watching most of your family murdered, followed you when you were sent to Auschwitz as a teenager. How you survived is a miracle. How you endured the death march to Bergen-Belsen, where you were finally liberated, is another. It was there you met Murray (Papa) who became your husband.

What we know of your short life—cut off at forty-one, when you took your own—is that you had a beautiful singing voice, a heart full of love for your three children, and a deep, dark secret. A secret no one ever truly knew, only sensed.

Now a book has been published that may offer a glimpse into what you carried, what turned your mind toward fear. Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson is a collection of letters between two women who grew up in Łódź, survived years in death camps, and were liberated at Bergen-Belsen.

Your journeys are identical.

Might you have known them? Might they have been your friends? Might the details they share: the memories, the language, the lingering terror, offer hints to what you never said out loud?

I don’t know. But I wonder: if you had been able to write letters—put those same thoughts, memories, and fears onto paper for someone who understood exactly what you had lived through—might it have helped? Might it have kept you from tying that rope around your throat, the same throat that once carried such beautiful notes?

Or perhaps you would have written letters to your granddaughter, who would have listened, asked questions, tried to carry the weight with you. Like I did with Papa.

We’ll never know.

Letters are proof that someone was here. That they endured long enough to leave a mark. In the face of erasure, a letter says: I lived. I remember. On days like this, remembrance depends on what was written, and what was lost.

With love (and, as always, a catch in my throat),
Felice

P.S. If you carry a story, a grief, or a trauma that has never had a place to land, consider writing it as a letter, even if you never send it. Sometimes the act of writing is its own form of remembrance.

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Felice Cohen is an award-winning author, best known for squeezing big ideas into small spaces—like her 90-square-foot NYC apartment (yes, really). Her books include Half In: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Forbidden Love, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet, and What Papa Told Me, with praise from legends like Elie Wiesel and Rita Mae Brown. Her viral YouTube tour has racked up over 25 million views—mostly from people wondering where she kept her shoes. More at felicecohen.com.