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Holocaust Stories
Stories that you must read.
The last postcard
A postcard flew from the window of a train. It contained a message of love – and it is almost all we have left of a woman, a wife and a mother who cherished her family.
Esther Frenkel was born Esther Horoncyk in 1913 in a small town called Krzepice in the south of Poland. After the death of her mother, she moved with her family to Paris, France in 1926.
She met and married Nissan Frenkel, a tailor, also from Poland, in Paris. Imagine their joy when son Richard was born in 1940. The family lived at 3 Rue Castex in Paris and worked in the textile trade. Esther’s father Shimon lived in the same courtyard.
On May 14th, 1941, Nissan was arrested simply because he was a Jew. He was sent to the Beaune-la-Rolande concentration camp, south of Paris. This camp was unusual in that prisoners were allowed to receive letters and packages from relatives.
Two weeks later, on May 31st, Nissan received a letter from Esther. She said how she was missing him but was still hopeful: “We will live again as we once did in the past, and our lives will be more beautiful.” She said that Richard, their little son, was “a wonderful boy, full of life.” This letter still exists and is now in a museum.
Nissan occupied his time in the camp by making a special present for his son – a wooden letter opener inscribed to “my dear little Richard” for his second birthday. He managed to send the present a few days before being deported to Auschwitz in southern Poland on June 28th, 1942. He was murdered there by the Nazis on September 1st.
On July 17th 1942, Esther and her son Richard were also arrested. It was the second day of mass arrests of the Jews of Paris – an operation called “Spring Breeze”. In all, 28,000 Jews were taken over two days. When police arrived, Esther’s father Shimon ran down to the courtyard and pleaded to be arrested in place of his grandson. They refused and promised to return to arrest him as well.
At first, Esther and Richard were taken to an indoor bicycle racing track called the Velodrome d’Hiver near the Eiffel Tower. Some 13,000 Jews were held there by French police, on the orders of the German authorities. The conditions were appalling. It was July and hot. The velodrome had a dark glass roof and the windows had been screwed shut for security. There were no toilets. The only water and food available was brought in by a few doctors and nurses, and by kind volunteers. Only 400 of the Jews taken there would survive the war.
On August 7th, 1942, Esther was deported to Auschwitz, leaving her little son Richard in the camp alone. There were 1,800 other children there, most of them without their parents. On the train, on the way to Auschwitz, Esther did an extraordinary and memorable thing. She wrote a postcard to her family. This is what it said:
My dear family,
I am on the train. I do not know what has become of my Richard. He is still in Pithiviers. Save my child, my innocent baby!!! He must be crying horribly. Our suffering is nothing. Save my Richard, my little darling. I can’t write. My heart, my Richard, my soul, are far away and no one is protecting my little two-year-old boy. To die, quickly, oh my child! Give me my Richard.
It’s clear she was desperate to ensure her little boy was safe. She was missing him terribly. She urged someone, anyone, to save him. Esther threw the postcard from the train wagon. Somehow, we don’t know how, it was found and saved. It is believed that Esther was murdered the same day, on her arrival at Auschwitz.
In the meantime, toddler Richard was moved from Pithiviers to another camp in Drancy. From there, on September 11th 1942, he was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz. Both his parents were already dead. Richard was murdered in the gas chambers the same day.
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To separate a mother and a child, to kill an innocent. A horror!