What stuck out to me this week in class was looking at the last letters from the Holocaust. My biggest takeaway is the manner in which adults wrote to their children. Both of the letters I read were from a parent to a child (father to son, and mother to daughter, respectively). These parents were being held in internment/concentration camps and were definitely receiving unfavorable and cruel treatment that eventually led to death. I imagine the parents knew the way things were going and knew they would likely be killed, but they never mentioned that or the way they were treated in their letters to their children. This is a big contrast to the way that an adult would write to another adult. In class, we discussed the letters we read with a classmate. Shanyah read a letter written by a mother to a woman begging her to adopt her daughter. The tone is drastically different: desperate and grave. She knew her fate and wanted to make sure that her daughter would be taken care of, which is absolutely heartbreaking. Reading letters from the Holocaust makes it so much more real. It really humanizes the victims, and I find it devastating, of course, but also fascinating.