The Last Letter

Neither of you know that this will be your last letter. It sits on your father’s walnut desk.

When you loved him, you knew it was a forbidden love, a Jewish girl falling in love with a Christian boy in Nazi Germany.

It was a dangerous game you played with this man you never met, but knew intimately, sharing your joys, sorrows, and even writing about what’s happening in your world in a code only you and he understood. You had been penpals with him for years, exchanging black and white pictures, but they could never tell the whole story.

There was this letter on the floor, with all the papers, on the day they took you away, to a hell called Dachau.

It was that final letter you never sent, the letter you couldn’t send, because they had come and gotten you, those armed men, the ones who wanted to eradicate you simply because you were Jewish.

~~~~~~

Though he never heard from you again, his sweet Elizabeth, the smile and legacy you left behind would never be forgotten.

Someone would find that letter decades later, yellowed with time, your final goodbye. Yet, even in code, the words touched him, a code he forgot he remembered.

During his remaining time, he would share your story, reminding others of how horrible that time was, the pain, the loss. Despite not having a gravesite to visit, he had fading black and white photos, hundreds of yellowed letters and the memories of what might have been.

Copyright ©️ Michelle R Kidwell

December.10.2022

Revised April.15.2024