Two Holocaust survivors wrote each other letters for decades. Now they're being shared with the world

After her mother passed away in 2011, Goldie Morgentaler was going through a collection of old papers and documents when she found letters, written in Polish over more than half a century, between her mother and a childhood friend, Zenia Larsson.  

“They were in Auschwitz together, they were in a forced labour camp together, they were in Bergen-Belsen together,” said Morgentaler, a professor emerita at the University of Lethbridge.

The correspondence, lasting decades, reveals the experiences of two women starting anew in separate countries after surviving the Holocaust together.  

Morgentaler is the daughter of Chava Rosenfarb, a Polish-born Jewish woman and Yiddish-language author who moved to Canada after surviving the horrors of the Nazi camps.  

Jewish London is hosting a talk on Nov. 13 featuring Morgentaler, who will discuss the correspondence between the two women, who survived the Holocaust together and both went on the have prominent literary careers.

“I expected to find some evidence of trauma in the letters, but not quite the way I found it.”

After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the two women went their separate ways — Rosenfarb to Canada via Belgium, and Larsson to Sweden, where she would eventually publish her own book about the letters in 1972.

Sharing details of their lives with each other, it was clear they experienced a sort of “general malaise,” Morgentaler told CBC News. 

A powerful example was a letter in which her mother describes swimming at the beach years later and suddenly seeing the faces of people who had died back in Poland, she said.  

There were also happier revelations that surprised Morgentaler, including the love her mother expressed for her father, abortion rights advocate Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who was also a survivor.

The marriage was always difficult, she recalled, with her mother spending years writing about the horrors of the past, while her father, conversely, longed to forget it — an example of the different ways people process trauma.

Morgentaler edited the letters into a book, titled Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson. She will be discussing the book at the Jewish London event as part of Holocaust Education Month, marked in November each year.

Sonia Halpern, an art history instructor at Western University, will be facilitating the discussion with Morgentaler. She brought the idea to Jewish London after she recently heard Morgentaler speak in the United States.    

Halpern was fascinated when she heard about the two women, she said in an interview on CBC’s Afternoon Drive.