Miracle letter discovered
One line is particularly powerful: “The future does not look all that good for me but as long as there is life, there is hope.”
A CHANCE discovery in Holland last year, followed by a hunch that prompted a lengthy search, has resulted in 94-year-old Sydney Holocaust survivor Harry Fransman receiving the unimaginable in the post.
It was a 76-year-old letter in Dutch from his brother, Jo, who tragically didn’t survive the war.
Typed on February 6, 1941 in The Hague, where the Fransman family was living, the letter was to a friend in Rotterdam called Egbert.
Egbert, who died later that year in a car crash, was the great uncle of Nelleke Kreeft who, by chance, found the letter last year in a box that belonged to her grandmother.
Emotionally affected by the letter’s connection to her own ancestor, Kreeft decided to begin searching online for a living relative of Jo. Having had no luck for months, she came across a Municipality of Rotterdam document that indicated a Harry Fransman had moved to Australia.
That led her to Harry’s website, and an emotional phone call to him and his partner Marilyn about the precious find.
Fransman told The AJN, “When I opened the envelope and saw my brother’s name at the bottom of the letter, that’s when it sunk in.
“I burst into tears and just couldn’t stop crying – my brother was so very close to me,” he said.
“The last time we saw each other was in 1942, when I was 19 and he was 27. I was sent to a Dutch camp and then camps in Poland, including Auschwitz.
“Jo was sent to a different camp and was eventually murdered by the Nazis. So were our parents.”
In the letter, Jo thanks Egbert for his friendship, reveals how his family had “lost everything” when living in Rotterdam, and sheds some light on his romantic life.
One line is particularly powerful: “The future does not look all that good for me but as long as there is life, there is hope.”
Fransman said due to censorship restrictions in Holland at the time, some parts of the text appear to be vague, or deliberately left out by Jo. “As such, there are about 20 things in the letter that I can understand, but probably nobody else would.”
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