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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)