Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (review)

It is hard to find a book that surprises us with new details about the Holocaust. This collection is such a book, adding significant detail to the individual stories that constitute the Holocaust and tracing difficult and often heartbreaking decisions made by U.S. wartime immigration officials. The story is contained in a Jewish family’s letters from Poland, U.S. government documents, and explanatory essays by the editors.

The discovery of the correspondence came after a fatal 1986 car crash killed the parents of Richard Hollander, a former newspaper and television reporter who subsequently discovered that his father had carefully saved but hidden hundreds of letters from the family he had left behind in Poland. Included in the collection were also letters and documents from U.S. government officials pertaining to the immigration case of his father, Joseph, who had come to America illegally in 1939, and the latter’s attempts to obtain permission for his family to come.

Joseph never spoke to his son about this experience. All of the people addressing him—including his mother, three aunts, their husbands, and two nieces—were trapped in Poland. Their only hope for escape lay with Joseph. And yet while doing what he could for his family, Joseph had to grasp at every possible opportunity provided under U.S. immigration law to keep from being deported himself.

The text horrifies the reader today, who knows that only a small percentage of Polish Jews survived. Adding to their poignancy, almost all of the present letters express hope despite the increasingly hopeless situation for Jews in Poland between 1939 and 1941. Unlike survivors’ memoirs, these letters recount neither political events nor individual sufferings (apart from the heartache of separation). Fearful of the postal censorship, the authors encode certain events (such as at least one failed attempt to leave Poland), as well as their hopes and fears. Fortunately the editors have supplied a consistent annotation to provide context and explanation. The letters themselves record an intimate account of a day-to-day life soon to end for three generations of Hollander’s family.

With all the more horror do we read today of their happiness at having the advantage of a family member in the U.S. working to get them out of Poland. Indeed, Joseph procured Nicaraguan documents for his family. His sister Dola expressed their relief at receiving them in December 1940: “Today we received the papers from the Consulario General De Nicaragua . . . . Mania cries from happiness. Dawid got into a state of euphoria and . . . Genia studies the map all day long. My dear, you are a genius!” (p. 200). Soon they would learn that three months earlier it had become impossible for Jews to leave, when in September the Nazis blocked emigration from the General Government. Despite this, the letters continued to praise Joseph as the family’s protector. In June 1941 his sister Dola again wrote: “It seems that all your energy and costs connected with Nicaragua were needless but, as you write yourself, there is nothing bad that can’t turn into something good. I have no doubt that you would give us a star from heaven if only you could” (pp. 253–54). Today we can only imagine how Joseph lived with such lines reverberating in his memory.

There is little room for comfort in this story, but such letters of Jewish life in extremis fill a gap, their many voices evoking a textured record of the experience of heavily assimilated Polish Jews under Nazi occupation. As the social fabric around them came apart, at least this family bonded the more fiercely. Of course we witness some of the frictions common to all domestic life, but we read too of the depth of love the mother felt for her children, the sister for her brother, the niece for her favorite uncle. This is a family who...