Faris Cassell: The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help

Date/Time
Date(s) - January 30, 2022
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Speaker
Faris Cassell

Categories No Categories

JGSLA invites you to our next meeting

“The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help by Faris Cassell

A 2020 National Jewish Book Award winner”

Sunday  January 30th, 2022  at 1:30 pm
Pacific Time (US & Canada)

HERE IS THE  link to the recorded meeting

The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help by Faris Cassell is a compelling book about the search to find out what really happened to Alfred and Hedwig Berger. The search was initiated because of a long lost letter begging for help. The author’s husband brought home this letter that was obtained from one of his patients. Months after Nazis seized Vienna in 1939, a Jewish merchant named Alfred Berger poured all of his hope into one last letter. Written to a stranger whose address he acquired by chance, it crossed an ocean and landed in a mailbox 6,000 miles away — a desperate plea for help that would never come.  The search to find out what really happened to Alfred and Hedwig takes the author and her husband across several continents and several years.  This program tells the story uncovered through investigating the unanswered letter. The family that she is able to bring together is an amazing conclusion to her family research.

FARIS CASSELL  is a jour­nal­ist and writer. She earned a B.A. in his­to­ry from Mount Holyoke Col­lege and an M.S. in jour­nal­ism from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon. Her decades of research into Alfred and Hed­wig Berger’s sto­ry was sup­port­ed by a Mount Holyoke Alum­nae Schol­ar­ship and by the gen­er­ous coop­er­a­tion of the Berg­er fam­i­ly. The Unan­swered Let­ter won the 2020 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award for Holocaust.