After So Much Pain and Anguish
First Letters after the Holocaust

On September 14, 2026, the first German translation of After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters after Liberation will be published by Herder Verlag. Edited by Dr. Robert Rozett and Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, the volume brings together letters written by Jewish Holocaust survivors in the period immediately following their liberation. The Alfred Landecker Foundation supports the publication of the book.

What the survivors themselves considered important

The letters differ fundamentally from many accounts written later. They were not written decades after the events, nor were they produced in response to questions from historians or during interviews. In many cases, they were the first messages survivors sent to relatives, friends and acquaintances after liberation.

This is precisely what makes them so significant: the authors themselves decided what they wanted to communicate at that moment. They wrote about what mattered to them most immediately: their own survival, family members who had been murdered, the search for people whose fate was still unknown, and the question of how life could continue.

The letters were written in different countries and in Russian, German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Slovak, Dutch and Polish. They thus also document the geographical, linguistic and cultural diversity of Jewish experiences during and after the Holocaust.

Liberation was not a single, clear-cut moment

The documents make clear that “liberation” cannot be reduced to a single moment. For many survivors, the end of persecution also marked the beginning of a confrontation with the scale of their loss. Relatives had to be searched for, news of deaths had to be conveyed, families reunited and new perspectives for the future found.

Iael Nidam-Orvieto describes a recurring theme in the letters as the need to understand what had happened, to grieve and, at the same time, to take the first steps back into life. Amid accounts of persecution and loss, the letters therefore also contain questions about family members, plans for the future and rebuilding one’s life.

Experiences after returning home were far from uniform. Prof. Dan Michman, for example, recounts letters written by his mother after she returned to the Netherlands following liberation. In them, she described not only the search for her son, who had been in hiding, and the family’s difficult reunion, but also her experiences upon returning to Amsterdam. For Michman, documents such as these show how historical developments become tangible at the level of individual families.

Placing personal testimonies in their historical context

The editors deliberately chose not to let the letters stand on their own. Each document is accompanied by historical contextualization that provides insight into its biographical, geographical and historical background. Together, the individual letters form a polyphonic picture. The collection presents survivors with very different experiences – including people who survived concentration camps, fought as partisans or lived in hiding. In doing so, it demonstrates that there was neither one single experience of the Holocaust nor one single experience of liberation.

Remembrance through individual voices

The Alfred Landecker Foundation supports the German edition because these documents do not convey history in the abstract, but make it accessible through the voices of individual people.

“Every first letter in this volume begins with the hope of receiving a reply. Eighty years later, we have become the recipients of these words. The letters reveal the diversity of Jewish experiences after liberation – and the different paths back into life. We support this project because it makes history tangible through individual voices and because these voices should also reach future generations,” says Lena Altman, CEO of the Alfred Landecker Foundation.

Kai Diekmann, Chairman of the Friends of Yad Vashem e.V., explains: “These letters are legacies – first voices from the moment between hell and hope. At a time when the number of eyewitnesses is dwindling, their publication in German will serve as an admonition from the past. They show us that liberation represents the beginning of a new and often immeasurably difficult life story. These direct testimonies are a treasure trove of knowledge that we must preserve.”

The German translation now makes these testimonies accessible to a broader German-speaking audience. They help anchor the memory of the Holocaust in concrete biographies and individual experiences – while keeping visible the complexity of what “liberation” meant for survivors.