An A-4 American airmail envelope with a pencil marking Correspondance. Reina/Aaron, 45-6 contained 70 letters and other personal documents: telegrams of her father , Izak Spier trying to find his daughter and her husband, letters from British Jewish soldiers notifying him his loved ones were alive and active - reconstructing the Jewish community in Enschede, , a children's story "The Restless Channukka Candle" written by De Vries in 44 while in hiding and translated by Joe Reutlinger into English.
The De Vries couple : Reina, a lawyer, and her husband, Aron , the youngest son of the Zionist Rabbi Philip shimon De Vries, both in their 30's, moved from Haarlem to Enschede, after the akzia of 1941 which left the town of Enschede without religious leaders. Reina and Aaron were active members in the underground organized by Reverend Overduin. The letters describe life in Holland during this chaotic period. They are authentic accounts of how this couple tries to get back to "normalcy" while living in abnormal conditions, physically and emotionally. The letters reflect their coming to terms with the murder of many relatives and friends by the Nazis, and their own understanding of the experience of "hiding" and becoming what they call "invisible". We read about their physical, mental and financial situation and that of their relatives and friends, their travels throughout the ruined cities of Holland living on rations, without clothing, heating, supplies or housing. The letters tell about their dealings with authorities, Dutch and otherwise to retrieve property, obtain a permit to move to Adam, get a visa to the States or a certificate to Palestine and in their jobs in the JCC and Reina, working with Bram De Jong in "Lezrat Hayeled". In addition, the letters tell about inter- communal tensions between the reactionaries and the young Zionist leadership (Aaron - one of them) who are demanding reforms in liturgy and ideology.
These letters had a dramatic impact of on those who found them almost seventy years after they were sent, specifically on myself, as the youngest daughter of Sarah, and Reina Spier De Vries' namesake .
I was born in 1951, called after my living grandmother Judith , in her honor, and given the middle name of my deceased aunt Reina. When we came to Israel in 1962, I started using my middle name using the Dutch spelling. Reina was my mother's oldest sister and we knew basic information about her: born in 1910, the outstanding "older sister", a lawyer and an active Zionist, engaged ten years to Aaron De Vries. We also knew that Reina died in childbirth. Besides loving words about her –Sarah, or Sartje . as she was called by Dutch people who knew her from childhood, never lit a yeirziet candle, never travelled to Holland, never really talked about Reina nor explained why the couple did not escape with the other nine members of the Spier family in May 1940 from Ijmouden to England on a "fisherman's boat". She never told us how Reina and Aron had survived the war. We never heard a full story from any other relative either. At hindsight – I can say truthfully that we never really asked. Perhaps unconsciously we understood that this topic was "out of bounds". Nevertheless the radioactivity of this silence pervaded my inner self and influenced it greatly. That is why when I read the following letter it was as if I had written it. If this were staged, we - Reina and I -would be reading it simultaneously as a monologue - or maybe even echoing each other:
26 June 1945
In fact I would like to write to you all day. There is so much to tell about the past years and the whole time we thought about you - even when we had no connection with you . And so now – now I want to write to you all day just so I can concentrate on being close to you again but there is so much work to do …. we have to work from morning to late at night ...
These letters raised the heavy opaque curtain of secrecy connected to those terrible years of the war and the years right after it – prior to the birth of my brother and myself.