Thank you for sharing your personal letter!
Dear Mr. Shayne,
Thank you for offering a unique reading experience with the the book Remember Us. I am just at the end of it and I must say it really is a moving story.
I have read a lot of books / biographies depicting these horrific times and still one meets a Holocaust denier, even here in peaceful Sweden; just recently realized one of our friends is just that.
There has been scary statistics presented in media here, how little the youth of Sweden know about this sad period of our recent history.
As for my own family, on my father’s side, they had top pay a heavy toll; my grand father was a brave man who together with som friends organized escapes for jews and other persecuted people. They managed to get them out from Hungary to Romania through Transylvania where they lived. Ultimately, of course, Gestapo found out and my grandfather, grandmother (and unfortunately, my uncle, who was over from Budapest for the weekend) were taken away, never to come back again.
My grandmother on my mother’s side, helped Jewish directors of their savings bank to get Swedish papers from Raoul Wallenberg, and I know that many of them made it to freedom. My grandfather though never came back from the Eastern Front, where hundreds of thousands of Hungarians lost their lives for a totally lost cause.
Yours truly
Peter v. F.