The plight of the writers can be read in the exclamation points.
“Extremely urgent case!!!” wrote Blima Bierzonski, on Dec. 13, 1938 seeking entry for herself and her 7-year-old daughter, Gerda. Her husband, Viktor, had left earlier that year for the United States, where they hoped to join him. But now the Nazis gave her just a few weeks to leave the country or be deported.
Any stay in the Netherlands would be temporary, she promised. “I will really not be a financial burden to anyone,” she said. Blocked from the Netherlands, she and Gerda fled to Belgium and moved from country to country for the next few years, finding no safe place, until Bierzonski was forced to leave her daughter with a family in Switzerland. They would not reunite again until 1946.
One tragic tale that Pennewaard tracked concerned a 33-year-old father, Nathan Awrutin, from Berlin, who wrote begging for temporary entry. He only wanted to wait in Holland until his family received papers that would allow them to join his parents in Palestine.
The German police had ordered his family to evacuate their home by Jan. 1, 1939, he said. But he, his wife, Hertha, and their 5-year-old son, Ronald, had nowhere else to go.
“We’ve tried every possible means to emigrate from Germany, but without any success,” he wrote. “My family and I place all our hopes on you, because you are the only one who can help us. My wife and I aren’t able to sleep at night, because we worry about what will become of us. I cannot provide for my family here, and my son has become malnourished.”
Searching public records, Pennewaard found only a few documents about the Awrutins. The couple, she discovered had had a second son, Simon, born in 1942, but she could find no record of their whereabouts at that time.