Dear Strauss family!
Today I’d like to write a letter to you in great detail. I’m sure you received the
telegram and the postcard. Of course, we very much rejoiced with dear Alfred,
when your telegram arrived and we learned, thanks be to God, that you were save.
Alfred didn’t know for joy what to do first. We also rejoiced about Gertrud’s
rescue. By now you have most likely heard from her personally. Hopefully the two
of you have already recovered quite well in Sweden, and as you get to the point
when you learn to forget about the terrible time, and you will be reunited with your
children again, then everything, everything indeed will be all right again.
Here we, too, have a terrible time behind us. My husband has been living here for
12 years already, and I have been here for 9 years. In January of 1939 my dear
parents and my youngest sister came to stay with us. My sister, however, stayed
only for half a year, then she moved on to England.
In April of 1943 we were supposed to report at a camp in this region in order to be
deported, but we didn’t do it. We found some very kind Dutch people, who took us
in and hid us. For 17 months we had disappeared from the face of the earth, and
then in September of 1944 the liberation came true, and we went back into our
house.
