Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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Both maintained regular correspondence with their families. Prior to the
outbreak of World War Two, Gisela Kent received a parcel from her father
containing numerous family possessions, including his war medals. 135 All letters
from Germany were censored, often with sections blacked-out or even with pieces
physically cut out of the letters. 136 Conversely, their families, knowing of the
censorship and fearing for their own safety wrote in a guarded manner, often so
encoded that the young recipients had no idea of what their families were trying to
communicate. Gisela Kent recalled:
Letters were not only censored, but they were cut out. I remember my mother
writing that my father was on a holiday, and that he was using a hair restorer.
That was to tell me that his hair had been shaved and that he was in a
concentration camp. And I picked it up; I knew what she was saying. He
would not have gone on a holiday without her, and he certainly didn’t need a
hair restorer, but normally I didn’t know what was in the letters. 137
Both young girls had unintentionally become a component of the generation of
German-Jewish youth who had become the ‘children turned into letters.’ As
Kaplan states, this expression of the time revealed the excruciating pain and
despair of both parents and children. 138
Gisela Kent’s maternal grandmother (Margarete Bock née Tobias), who
farewelled her at the railway station died of natural causes on 7 November 1942
and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Magdeburg. 139 Her mother and brother,
Alice and Günther Jankelowitz, were residing at Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße 28 until
their deportation to the Warsaw ghetto in early 1942. Their address in the Warsaw
ghetto was Garten-Straße 27. The last correspondence Gisela Kent received from
135
Kent, op. cit., 12 January 1998.
136
Ibid and Poppert, op. cit., 9 January 1998.
137
Kent, op. cit., 5 January 1998.
138
Kaplan, op. cit., p. 117. The phrase in its original German was: ‘Aus Kindern
wurden Briefe.’
139
Personal file on the Jankelowitz family, Bestand Pe, Signatur Nr. 22, ASGM, op.
cit.