ABSTRACT
One day in 1982, while Edith Kurzweil was immersed in research for a book on psychoanalysis at the offices of Vienna's Freud Gesellschaft, its librarian, Lydia, showed her a shiny, red book. "This is a shortened summary of over two thousand special laws, decrees, and regulations the Nazis ordered for the treatment of Jews in Germany, Austria, and in whatever other countries they conquered". A few months after Kurzweil's father died, in November 1993, her ninety-two-year-old mother handed her a tattered, brown manila envelope stuffed with barely legible letters, on thin airmail paper. The letters were mostly from her grandmother, Malvine Fischer. Her family's letters testify that even as Jews began to know that they might be "relocated to Poland", they did not foresee that they would be slaughtered. The propaganda by the Nazi leadership kept blaming the Jews for every mishap related to the war, and for the resulting adversities Germans eventually would have to suffer.
