Relatives: Photographs

The Holocaust Dept: The voices of nearly everyone in her family were silenced when they perished in the Holocaust. Waldstein Wilkes, a toddler when she escaped Europe with her parents to Canada in 1939, knew most of her relatives only from photographs in an album, according to Montreal Gazette. Her father stored them in a red-lidded box, and the letters were never spoken of; indeed, a great deal was not spoken of, so that her parents' trauma came to be a mysterious "shadowy presence" in her life. "Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. I often wondered what it would be like to know your relatives," Helen Waldstein Wilkes writes, in Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery. Only much later in life did she discover their letters, written in tiny German script crowded onto paper so thin it was transparent, that described their lives - letters that grew increasingly desperate and frantic as the writers came to realize there was no way out. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.