What Was In The Box
Esme and her mother opened the box together, that evening, at the kitchen table at home.
They did it carefully, the way you would open something fragile.
Inside there were not many things. There were:
— a small notebook, leather-bound, with a fountain-pen-and-pencil journal in tiny German handwriting
— three letters, in different handwriting, postmarked between 1945 and 1947
— a small flat tin, about the size of a hand, that turned out to contain a child's drawing on a folded piece of paper, dated 1944
— a printed booklet from a Holocaust memorial museum, with one page bookmarked
— a single photograph: two girls of about thirteen, in light coats, standing beside a wooden door
— a list, in Helga's adult handwriting, of seven names. Six of the names had a small cross next to them. The seventh — *Lotte Kaufmann* — did not.
Esme's mother explained what she knew, slowly, as they went through the items.
Helga had been one of two sisters — Helga and Anna — sent with their parents from Berlin to Theresienstadt in early 1944. Theresienstadt had been, Esme's mother said carefully, a transit camp; many people sent there had been moved on to camps where they were murdered. Helga and Anna had been kept at Theresienstadt because, very luckily, their father had been a doctor and a physician was needed there.
In April 1945 the camp was liberated. Helga had been thirteen. Anna had