“After So Much Pain and Anguish”
Book Launch at Berlin’s Kino International

“By a miracle, I am still alive.” These are the opening words of a letter written by Arthur Feige on March 13, 1946. Like many of the letters collected in After So Much Pain and Anguish – First Letters after the Holocaust, it was never intended for an archive or for future generations. It was, first and foremost, a personal message to say: I am alive.

With the auditorium filled to capacity, Iris Berben and Oliver Masucci read from letters written by Jewish survivors who, shortly after their liberation, reached out to relatives and friends to let them know they had survived and to seek connection and reassurance in a world that had been shattered.

At the start of the evening, Kai Diekmann, Chairman of the Friends of Yad Vashem, and publisher Manuel Herder reflected on how the book came about. “Many of these letters were originally written in German,” Diekmann noted. When he received the English edition ten years ago, Diekmann said he immediately felt that the book should also be published in German.

The German edition, edited by Yad Vashem historians Robert Rozett and Iael Nidam-Orvieto, brings together letters written by Jewish survivors in the period immediately following liberation. Written in different countries and languages, they reflect a wide range of experiences: those of concentration camp survivors, partisans and people who survived in hiding. Each document is accompanied by historical commentary that places it within its biographical, geographical and historical context.

What Survivors Chose to Say

Part of what makes these letters so significant is the moment in which they were written. Unlike many memoirs produced decades later, they were not shaped by hindsight or written in response to questions posed by historians. The survivors themselves decided what they wanted to communicate in those first weeks and months after liberation: that they were alive, whom they had lost, whom they were still searching for – and how life might possibly continue after everything they had endured.

The range of these first messages becomes clear in the individual letters included in the volume. Recha Oettinger, born in 1872 and liberated from Theresienstadt on May 8, 1945, wrote to her daughter Grete and son-in-law Ernst in the United States on August 1, 1945. Her hope of ever seeing her son Herbert, his wife Betty and their children again, she wrote, had “shrunk to almost nothing.” Confronted with such profound loss, she asked: “I am condemned to go on living – for what and why?”

Grischa Birman wrote to friends from Kaunas on September 4, 1944, just one month after his liberation: “I am writing you a letter as if from the other world.” He described the destruction of the Jewish community in his hometown and reported that, of the roughly 40,000 Jews who had lived there before the war, only around 700 had survived.

Together, these letters make clear why “liberation” did not mark a simple or joyful ending for many survivors. Instead, it was the beginning of an often painful search for relatives, for a sense of belonging and for a possible future. The end of immediate persecution also meant confronting the full scale of what had been lost: relatives had to be traced, news of deaths had to be delivered, families had to be reunited and entirely new lives had to be imagined and built.

In her keynote address, Federal Minister of Education Karin Prien described the volume as a milestone in Germany’s culture of remembrance. The letters, she said, bear witness both to the greatest crime in human history and to the inner strength of those who survived the Shoah. “With these letters, I hope that we can leave future generations testimonies that make these experiences tangible, fostering empathy, understanding and, not least, an appreciation of the value of our democracy.”

Professor Dan Michman, former head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, placed the letters in their historical and scholarly context. He also spoke from a deeply personal perspective: his mother was one of the letter writers whose words appear in the volume. Michman highlighted the wide range of responses reflected in the letters – from exhaustion and despair to the determination to carry on living and the hope of helping future generations build a more humane world.

The evening was accompanied musically by Nur Ben-Shalom on clarinet and Francesca Zappa on viola. Journalist Tanit Koch moderated the event.

Why We Support This Project

To close the evening, Lena Altman reflected on Alfred Landecker, the man in whose memory the Alfred Landecker Foundation is named. In April 1942, he was deported from Mannheim to the Izbica transit ghetto. From there, he wrote a letter to his children. It is the last known message from him.

“As a foundation dedicated to preserving his memory, we want to preserve the voices of those who were able to write again – while also remembering those who never had the chance to send another message,” says Lena Altman, CEO of the Alfred Landecker Foundation. “Every first letter in this volume begins with the hope that an answer might come. Eighty years later, we have become the recipients of these words.”

The German edition makes these immediate testimonies accessible to a wider German-speaking audience for the first time. Further initiatives will follow, including a reading tour across Germany and Austria and a social media campaign.

We would like to thank Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the Friends of Yad Vashem e. V. and Herder Verlag for their collaboration on this volume.