The Last Letter Before Auschwitz

The heartbreaking true story of love and longing during the holocaust.

A daughter’s powerful journey into her mother’s greatest secret, and the war that split her life in two.

From June 1940 to October 1943, the young German-Jewish refugee Ernst Cosmann, known to his friends as Erco, wrote 109 letters from his home in the Netherlands, and later from the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, to his fiancée, Ilse Birnbaum, who had fled with her parents from Berlin to Amsterdam. But whereas Ilse survived with the underground Joop Westerweel resistance group, Erco did not share her fate. On September 14, 1943, Erco was finally transported to Auschwitz. In his last letter before his departure, he wrote Ilse: “Stay strong, believe in our love and our shared future.”

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