Lifelines: A Viennese Family's Letters from Home and Exile, 1938-1947

Fragile letters, crammed into red manila folders, had stories to tell.

Hidden for decades in the hall closet of the one-bedroom New York apartment where Pat Haim grew up, the letters found their voices again after Pat inherited them from her parents. The folders were filled with WWII-era letters, hundreds of them. They had been written to her father by his Vienna-based family as they scattered into exile in England, the United States, Australia, and beyond.

Sorting them first by writer and date, then translating the more legible handwritings, Pat began to excavate and reconstruct the lives of the remarkable people who wrote these letters during appalling times.

Through first person, real-time narratives, Lifelines gives voice to the daily survival of a family. Not a backward-looking memoir, the letters record their writers' present-tense thoughts and awareness in their own voices. They unfold a story of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles-ordinary individuals-who heroically continued to write through traumas of separation and oppression.

Their letters were precious lifelines both for writers and recipients. Although some threads ended in tragedy, sometimes there were triumphs-escapes from Nazi-ruled Vienna, life-saving visas granted, and bittersweet reunions.