The Last Letter

I never thought my father would ever do something that would hurt those he loved, including me.
            Still, he tried to kill himself. On February 11, 2002, a Monday, I was in my kitchen in Brooklyn, making dinner, when the phone rang. I recognized the 214 area code—Dallas—but not the number. My husband, Bob, answered upstairs. After a few minutes, he called to me, “Can you come up here for a minute? It’s Don Cole.” Don and Judy Cole were my parents’ neighbors.
            The previous months, December and January, had been particularly trying for my parents. My mother’s congestive heart failure and lymphoma had left her ever more compromised, though she could still drive to the grocery store and to her water aerobics class. So my father had assumed a more active caregiver role, well beyond merely covering for my mother’s early-stage dementia. He would sit on a stool in the humid bathroom when my mother showered, watchful that she didn’t fall, ready with her towel. He did the cooking, the grocery shopping, the pharmacy runs. In charge. Dependable. 
            My brother, Dick, my sister, Diane, and I had gathered with our parents that January in Dallas to discuss their situation. Do they stay in their house with help from caregivers? Do they move to a senior residence in Dallas? Do they move to a senior residence on the East Coast, where all three of their children and six grandchildren live? 
            There had been another reason for such questions, however, beyond our mother’s frailty. At the time, we also had a family session with our father’s psychiatrist. Upon our urging, my father had recently started seeing him again. For the last several weeks, my father’s small tent calendar no longer showed a busy schedule, but blank days, one after the other. His affect had become dull and quiet. His mood seemed one of resignation. He had lost weight. Twelve years earlier, this psychiatrist had helped him get through a deep depression with therapy and medicine after triple bypass surgery, a period that lasted months but then seemed to dissipate. So we encouraged my father to try him again during this stressful period. 
            In the course of that family session, I said that I was “afraid of Dad doing something stupid,” an indirect allusion to suicide. The psychiatrist had turned to my dad and said, “You hear her, Rudy?” My dad nodded sheepishly. “Rudy,” the psychiatrist said, “that’s not the legacy I think you want to leave your kids. Right?” Again, my father nodded.
            Soon after that, my parents came to New York to sign a lease at a senior independent living residence in Manhattan. But my father was passive and withdrawn, and the day after he and my mother signed the lease, they broke it and returned to Dallas.
            Now, a few weeks later, my husband was handing me the phone and telling me that my father was in an intensive care unit. My father was in a coma. 
            I was standing in our bedroom. Time stopped. I shook uncontrollably. Don Cole’s deep voice, with its strong Southern accent, was usually so calming. He was telling me that my mother, Hanne, had found my father on the floor of the garage. As he told the story, she had thought it strange, and said to herself: “He doesn’t know a thing about fixin’ cars. What’s he doin’?’”
            Still shaking, I held on to Don’s every word. It seemed that my father had turned on the car, shut the garage, and lain down by the exhaust pipe. 
            Gas? He tried to gas himself? He tried to create his own gas chamber? 
            And now he could die. The doctors weren’t sure.
            Don explained that his wife, Judy, had brought my mother to their house, and that, although my mother seemed to be OK, he wasn’t sure how much she understood. She might be in shock. 
            There was more: my father had apparently taken a number of sleeping pills, too. My mother had found them in the bathroom, all over the counter. 
            “Oh, my God,” I said. We told our sons, Matthew and Adam, twelve and nine years old at the time, that “Grandpa was very sick.” We called my brother and sister and their spouses and told them the full story. My brother and I booked a morning flight to Dallas. I began to pack. I took my black suit off its hanger, the one I would wear to a funeral. I carefully folded it and laid it in my suitcase.
            But my father lived. 
 

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.

In The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed.

Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father’s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family’s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations—now many years after the tragic events of World War II—what it means to remember.

“In this haunting and remarkable book, Karen Baum Gordon reminds is that the Holocaust is a story that remains with us, and that storytellers like her are essential in passing the story from generation to generation.”—Michael Shapiro, Professor of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

“Both a very private account and a general outline of the German Jewish experience of the twentieth century, The Last Letter comprises the story of a family that contributed so much and lost so much. Allowing herself intimacy and trepidation in her reflections, Karen Baum Gordon offers one of the central intellectual challenges of Jewish existence in the aftermath of the Holocaust—the question of how to comprehend the ruptures that the Shoah denotes. This book names the ghosts of the past that haunt us, and it charges us to change our world for the better.”—Rabbi Prof. Dr. Walter Homolka, Rector, Abraham Geiger College, Potsdam, Germany
“The Last Letter is a compelling and beautifully written illustration of how individual family stories are critical to the ongoing and evolving process of Holocaust remembrance. Investigations like these, conducted by the children of the victims, provide compelling evidence about those who perished and those who survived, but also about the continuing impact on their descendants.”—William H. Weitzer, John H. Slade Executive Director, Leo Baeck Institute–New York and Berlin