400 Letters Tell of a Family’s Struggle to Survive Nazis

The red suitcase didn’t look like anything special, just an old American Tourister with a bit of rust on the hinges.

But inside was a treasure--close to 400 letters exchanged between a Jewish couple and their son in New York and the doomed loved ones they left behind in Vienna while fleeing the Nazi death machine.

“When I started reading them, it was very painful. These people are my childhood,” said Pierre Secher, a retired University of Memphis professor who found the letters in his mother’s apartment after her death in 1994. “I could hear their voices. I could see their faces.”

His two grandmothers and two middle-aged aunts and an uncle in Austria perished in the Holocaust. Their letters provide poignant insight into their lives as they tried to survive the Nazi occupation.

” . . . Do not worry about us and let it depress you. We are calm and prepared to face the worst,” Secher’s aunt, Marie Kulper, wrote in one of her last letters. She and her husband died at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Secher, 74, is translating the letters from German to English and has donated them to the university, where he taught political science for 24 years. He retired in 1991.

Peter Black, historian for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said such discoveries help put a human face on the Nazi horror.

“It gives a sense of the rhythm of daily life for individuals deemed to be racially inferior and racial enemies of the Nazi state,” Black said.

Secher was 15 when he arrived in New York with his parents in October 1939. For two years, his father, Emil, kept up a steady correspondence with the relatives in Vienna, sending what money he could and struggling in vain to navigate the governmental maze that prevented them from coming to the United States.

Secher’s father, a bookkeeper, was a methodical man. He kept all of the letters from Vienna, as well as carbon copies of the ones he wrote while sitting at a small table each evening, picking at a portable typewriter.

Secher found the letters neatly bound and arranged by date while helping to clean out his mother’s apartment.

“My dearest Emil,” one letter says, “you continue to blame yourself for leaving us here all by ourselves. But it is precisely that decision which now enables us to bear our fate more easily, knowing that the most precious people we have in this world have been spared all this.”

Soon after Secher and his parents left Vienna, their relatives were kicked out of their middle-class apartments and sent to small, cramped quarters. All around them, Jews were being deported to Poland. They knew their time was coming too.

“If only there wasn’t that nagging fear that we shall be sent away,” wrote Marie Kulper, who often handled the letter-writing for her family.

In their letters, Secher’s relatives used words like “sent away” and “resettled” to hide what they knew was a much harsher reality.

“They knew they were in the hands of people who would stop at nothing,” Secher said.

The letters show a creeping despair.

“You see the gradual erosion of hope and the hopelessness that sets in,” Secher said.

Emil Secher spent every spare hour in America struggling with government bureaucracy and looking for the sponsors required to bring immigrant families to the United States.

Federal law at the time severely restricted immigration from Eastern Europe. It made no distinction between ordinary immigrants and refugees fleeing for their lives. All needed sponsors to house them and help them find jobs.

“The bureaucracy helped kill them,” Secher said.

In one letter, Marie Kulper lamented that her son, Otto, who had managed to escape, had not yet found an apartment of his own in New York.

“Only too gladly would I give him my beautiful bedspread, the curtains and much other handmade embroidery,” she wrote. “We certainly don’t use and need them anymore. We just don’t want to leave it all here for others if we are sent away.”

Secher said his father’s last letter to Vienna, written Dec. 10, 1941, was never sent because mail service to Hitler’s Reich had been stopped. The letter shows the anguish his father was feeling.

“Again no mail and this is now the fifth week since we last heard from you and we’re really driven to despair,” Emil Secher wrote. “Our concern about you, my dearest ones, has now reached the state where we cannot even comfort each other.”

Secher has translated about three dozen letters so far and is determined to finish the rest. They are on public display at the university, along with photographs of his relatives.