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Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence between Helmuth and Freya von Moltke, 1944-45
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Oh my goodness give this to me now...
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This sounds inspiring and heartbreaking. Rachel Seiffert is the granddaughter of Nazis. Her grandparents, both of whom she loved, were unapologetic members of the Nazi party, something she struggled with.https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Helmuth von Moltke will be reading letters from this book in a Zoom meeting on Oct. 27 put on by the Montreal Jewish Public Library. Info can be found here:https://buy.acmeticketing.com/events/...
Publication Date: September 17, 2019
Pages: 380
Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch
Introduction by Rachel Seiffert
Edited by Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Johannes von Moltke and Dorothea von Moltke
Tegel prison, Berlin, in the fall of 1944. In a cell and shackled for most of the day, Helmuth James von Moltke is awaiting trial for his leading role in the Kreisau Circle, one of the most important German resistance groups against the Nazis. By a near miracle, the prison chaplain at Tegel is Harald Poelchau, a friend and co-conspirator of Helmuth and his wife, Freya. From Helmuth’s arrival at Tegel in late September 1944 until the day of his execution by the Nazis on January 23, 1945, Poelchau would carry Helmuth’s and Freya’s letters in and out of prison daily, risking his own life. Freya would safeguard these letters for the rest of her long life, considering them a treasure too intimate to share with the public before her death. Published to great acclaim in Germany in 2011, this volume now makes this deeply moving correspondence available for the first time in English.
Last Letters is a profoundly personal record of the couple’s love, faith, and courage in the face of fascism. Written during the final months of World War II and in the knowledge that each letter could be the last, the correspondence is at once a collection of love letters written in extremis and a historical document of the first order. Helmuth and Freya draw closer than ever as they await his trial and execution. They navigate both the mundane details of life in and out of prison during wartime, and their own profound swings between despair, hope, and elation as Helmuth prepares and revises his own defense and Freya tries to intercede on his behalf. Throughout, they are sustained by their conviction, by their faith, and by the knowledge, as Freya writes, “In the end, they can take nothing from you but your life!”