The Box My Grandmother Kept: Writing Back to the Dead After October 7

My grandmother survived the Holocaust by never speaking about it. That silence was its own kind of erasure, and for fifty years it worked. Her answer to every question my brothers and I ever asked about the past was the same:

You shouldn’t know from this.

So we stopped asking.

Then October 7 happened. And I understood that the box she kept hidden in the second drawer of her dresser was no longer something any of us could afford to leave closed.

******

It was Hanukkah, 1993. I was standing at her coat closet in Rego Park, Queens, scanning the apartment the way you scan something you are afraid of losing, when the thought arrived before I could stop it.

All the answers I had ever wanted would die with her.

She was in the bedroom, gathering her things. I waited. I looked at the large back window, the playground below, the other apartment buildings she had looked at every day. I was making a visual record without knowing why. As if some part of me already understood what was coming.

That night, she had a stroke. Two weeks later, she was gone.

In the week after the funeral, clearing out her apartment, we found the box.

******

It was an old Macy’s box, the kind meant to be thrown away after the gift has been opened. Red lid flecked with white speckles. My mother found it in the second drawer of the dresser. When she saw it, she went still. She lifted the lid, then closed it again. She knew what it was. To her, the box was grief.

To me, standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, it felt like something else. A door. A set of questions that had not yet died after all.

We did not open it then.

My grandmother had kept that box hidden for nearly fifty years. After she died, it passed to my mother, who kept it closed for another twenty-seven. It wasn’t until 2020, when I finally drove to Florida and sat with my mother at her kitchen table, that she handed it to me and said: as long as I get the box back, you can have it.

Inside: German passports stamped with the large red J, that Nazi decree required on all Jewish passports. Birth certificates. A marriage license. Tax clearance certificates. And letters. Dozens of letters, written in old German script in hands I could not read, sent from Vienna between 1939 and 1941.

My grandparents, Karl and Mathilde Reiser, had escaped Vienna. Karl left in March 1939. Mathilde followed in July. They made it to England and eventually to New York. Their parents did not get out.

The letters in the box were from the parents who stayed behind. Sigmund and Regine Reiser. Izak and Hermine Pokart. Writing to their children week after week, month after month. Asking about money. About visas. About the grandchild, my mother Frances, born in New York in 1940, whom some of them would never meet. Trying to stay connected across a distance that was growing in ways none of them could yet fully see.

My grandparents’ letters back did not survive. The people who would have kept them were murdered.

The archive is one-sided. That is not a literary choice. That is what happened to my family.

******

When I finally had the letters translated, I sat in my sunroom in Pennsylvania and opened the first one. It was from Tatilischko, Mathilde’s father, writing to his daughter. He was worried about rent. About money. The tone was urgent and plainly desperate. A father asking his child for help across an impossible distance. Putting the words down knowing she might not be able to give it. Sending it anyway because she was his daughter and he was her father and what else do you do.

I read it and I could not unread it.

I thought about what it costs a father to write a letter like that. To ask. To fold the paper, address the envelope, and send it out into a world that was closing around him. And I thought about my grandmother, young, far away, opening it. Holding it. Folding it back. Putting it in a box she would keep for the rest of her life and never speak about again.

The letters were no longer objects. They were conversations. Still open. Still waiting for someone to answer.

And then I understood what I had to do.

I wrote back.

Not to perform grief. Not to reconstruct what happened. Because the conversation had been left open, someone had to close the distance. As the letters arrived in clusters, I answered them the same way, writing back to each person across the arc of what they sent, returning to them again and again the way they returned to Karl and Mathilde. In the voice of the great-grandchild they never knew, writing to the great-grandparents who never stopped writing to my grandparents. Signing my name the way you sign a letter to someone who is still worth speaking to. Because they are. Because the archive does not close just because the people in it are dead. Because a book that holds their voices and mine together is the only answer I know how to give.

Witness is not a historical act. It is a choice made again every day.

******

I thought I understood what the archive meant. October 7 showed me I had only understood it from a safe distance.

I had been working on this project for years before that morning. I already understood in some abstract way that antisemitism had not ended, that history was not safely in the past, that the silence my grandparents maintained had been a form of protection that came at a cost. But I lived, as many American Jews live, with a degree of removal from it. The Holocaust was history. Terrible, foundational, formative history, but history. Something that had happened, been documented, been mourned, been memorialized.

October 7 ended that distance.

What happened in southern Israel that morning was not random. It was organized, systematic, and celebrated. Jews were hunted because they were Jews. The hatred that killed my great-grandparents in Theresienstadt and Treblinka and Włodawa did not die with them. It went somewhere, and it waited, and on October 7, it came back.

In the days after, I found myself going back to the letters. Not for comfort exactly. For grounding. For the feeling of holding something that proved what hatred looks like when it is permitted to operate without interruption. And for the feeling of holding something that proved that the people it targeted were people. Fully, specifically, irreducibly people.

Sigmund Reiser, born October 9, 1879. Deported April 27, 1942. Murdered. Regine Reiser, born September 20, 1875. Deported April 27, 1942. Murdered. Izak Pokart, born September 22, 1869. Deported August 13, 1942 to Theresienstadt. Deported again September 26, 1942 to Treblinka. Murdered. Hermine Pokart, born June 13, 1881. Same transports. Murdered.

These are not statistics. These are the people who wrote those letters. Who worried about rent and visas and whether their daughter was eating enough. Who signed their names with love at the bottom of every page.

After October 7, I could not look at those signatures the same way.

And I understood something else. The archive had come to me for a reason. Not mystically. Practically. It landed in my hands, in my sunroom in Pennsylvania, eighty years after those letters were written, because someone had to open it. Because the voices inside it had been silenced and silence, I now understood with a clarity I had not had before, is exactly what hatred depends on. It depends on no one knowing. On the story not being told. On the people inside the machinery, remaining abstractions rather than fathers writing desperate letters to their daughters about rent.

These voices have work to do in the world. That is what I felt after October 7. Not just grief. Not just witness. Responsibility. The archive had asked something of me, and I was going to answer it.

******

In 2019, a year before I received the box, I went to Vienna with my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, and my daughter Alexa. We stood outside the buildings where her family had lived. We touched the walls. We climbed the stairs. We stood at the doors. The city felt sealed against us, indifferent, as if they had never existed. No trace. No mark. The streets had closed over them the way water closes over a stone.

The next morning, at a ceremony held by the Stones of Remembrance project, small brass memorial markers were placed into the pavement outside the last freely chosen homes of Holocaust victims, returning their names to the streets where they once lived. We gathered in the cold morning air. A violin played. A woman sang in Yiddish, a lullaby I recognized, a melody I had once played for Alexa on a CD when she was small. Standing there, on those streets, hearing that sound, something in me broke open in the best possible way.

Alexa read a poem.

At the rising sun and at its going down, we remember them. At the blowing of the wind and the chill of winter, we remember them.

She was twenty years old. She had been asking me questions since she was nine or ten. Did we have family that didn’t make it? Did anyone survive? I had no answers then. I had the silence and the letters I couldn’t read and nothing I could give her that felt like enough.

Standing in that Vienna courtyard, listening to her voice above her great-great-grandparents’ names, I felt something I still don’t have the right word for. Pride is part of it. But it was more than pride. It was the end of something and the beginning of something else.

That morning, Brett and Alexa gave my mother, Alexa, and me three necklaces, each inscribed in Hebrew.

L’dor v’dor. From generation to generation.

I wear mine often. When the three of us are together, all three necklaces come out. My mother, my daughter, and I. Three generations of women who carry this, who choose to carry it, who will not put it down.

******

The box my grandmother kept hidden for nearly eighty years contained a one-sided correspondence. The voices of people writing toward their children across a distance that was closing around them. Hoping. Asking. Loving. Right up until the letters stopped.

I am writing back because the conversation was never finished. Because they were people, not entries in a ledger. Because these voices deserve to be heard, not only by me, not only by my family, but by anyone willing to understand what hatred looks like from the inside. Not the machinery. The people inside the machinery. Writing letters about rent.

Because witness is not something you do once and set down. Because my daughter stood in Vienna and read a poem above their names, and the fourth generation showed up.

Because after October 7, keeping the box closed is no longer something I know how to do.

My grandmother said: You shouldn’t know from this.

I know from this. And I am handing it to you.