This is a book Steven Robins was born to write, in honour and remembrance of family he never knew.Letters of Stone is a deeply moving, personalised account of a family’s suffering as the storm clouds built in Europe from the late 1930s. It is the story of a German Jew, the author’s father Herbert Robinski, who managed to immigrate — in reality, to flee — to SA in 1936. But, tragically, he could not get his parents and sisters out in time, and the book’s core comprises a translation of selected letters from the author’s grandparents, trapped in Berlin, to their son.Like most of his generation of survivors, refugees or those who suffered in myriad ways, Robins’ father said virtually nothing of his earlier life, or of what happened in the war. But, after his father’s death, Robins comes across the secreted letters, and they open a window of dreadful discovery.The correspondence spans 1936 to 1941, with heartrending fragmentary communication in the form of Red Cross telegrams for a whil...
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