From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust by Shirli Gilbert: Book Review

In her book Between Uniqueness and Assimilation on German Jewry, the historian Shulamit Volkov discusses the exceptionally large number of German Jews who published autobiographies before and after World War II. However, Shirli Gilbert’s From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust is not based on autobiographies. Instead, it uses about two thousand letters, New Year’s greetings, and official documents from government ministries and refugee aid organizations to tell the story of the Schwab family of Hanau, Germany—emotionally, frankly, and in great detail. This almost-epic documentation of one typical Jewish family in Nazi Germany in the second half of the twentieth century was preserved in a wooden box in South Africa and only recently discovered.