The Journey of the Letters: From the Exclusion Zone to World Heritage
Letters from Hell: The Circumstances of Survival
The 192 letters of the Dr. Albert Twers collection are no ordinary historical documents; they are the final signs of life from a place of planned death. In the military exclusion zone of Transnistria—the territory between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers under Romanian administration—the deported Jews of Bukovina were stripped of all legal rights. They lived in ruins, pigsties, and improvised camps, tormented by hunger, cold, and devastating typhus epidemics. In this absolute isolation, where the world had turned its face away, the written word was the only remaining proof of one’s own existence.
The letters were written under unimaginable hardship—on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of forms, or old newspaper margins, often by candlelight and through tears to loved ones back home. However, the path of these messages was a deadly risk. Since Transnistria was hermetically sealed, no official postal service existed. Any piece of paper leaving the zone without a censorship stamp was considered a tool for espionage or sabotage under Romanian military law. Albert Twers took this burden upon himself. He smuggled the letters directly on his person, hidden in his clothing, past armed gendarmerie posts and harsh inspections. For the senders, he was the "courier of hope"; for the system, he was a state enemy who risked his life on the scaffold every day.
The Arrest and the Legal Stratagem
After months of precise surveillance by the Siguranța Statului, the Romanian secret service, the arrest was made at the Chernivtsi railway station. Albert Twers was detained, and the 192 letters were seized. Given that the regime already considered him "politically unreliable" due to his biography and his marriage to a Jewish woman, the investigators' goal was clear: a show trial for high treason and espionage. They intended to make an example of him to stifle any form of moral courage at its source.
But Twers countered this attempt at destruction with the cool precision of an experienced lawyer. He knew that denial was futile given the confiscated letters. In a brilliant act of self-preservation, he confessed to the act but legally redefined it: he openly admitted to deliberately bypassing military censorship and additionally pointed out—almost provocatively—that he had used no postage stamps. He thus pleaded guilty to postal fraud and evasion of censorship. This move was genius: a postal fraudster was not a political traitor. With this confession of an "ordinary" offense, the secret service lost jurisdiction, and the case had to be handed over to the regular Gendarmerie. Twers saved his life by downgrading himself to a simple criminal to avoid execution as an enemy of the state.
Language Barriers and the Logic of Evidence
The Romanian Gendarmerie now faced a logistical disaster. While during the Austrian era, the administration had carefully recruited officials directly from Bukovina to be able to communicate in the melting pot of languages (German, Romanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Polish), the Romanian Kingdom pursued a policy of radical Romanianization. The gendarmes sent from the Old Kingdom did not understand a word of the confiscated correspondence.
Since the letters had been formally admitted as evidence during the trial, the strict rules of judicial bureaucracy applied. Evidence in an ongoing proceeding is subject to a ban on destruction; it cannot under any circumstances simply be disposed of. To use them, they had to be translated—a process so time-consuming and expensive that the authorities eventually surrendered, limiting themselves to 21 exemplary letters. The bureaucratic stubbornness of preserving evidence until the end of the trial and beyond paradoxically became the lifesaver for these documents.
The Soviet Era: Silence Under the Guise of Victory
After the end of the war and the Soviet occupation of Bukovina, the documents entered a phase of deep oblivion. The Soviet archival administration was shaped by a clear ideology: while they deported mass amounts of records to Moscow or St. Petersburg as spoils of war, what they left behind on-site was often ignored. The Soviets began a quasi-new archival system that technically used the old Fond numbers but represented a radical break in content.
The letters of the Twers collection were of no interest to the new rulers. The Holocaust as a singular crime against the Jewish population did not exist in the Soviet narrative; one spoke only of "peaceful Soviet citizens" murdered by fascism. Since the letters had no direct connection to the heroic Red Army or communist resistance, they were classified as irrelevant material of a "bourgeois-fascist" Romanian justice system. They remained in Fond 1061—invisible, unloved, but fortunately undestroyed.
The Ukrainian Period and Rediscovery
It was only after Ukrainian independence that a new evaluation of the holdings began. Nearly 60 years after the end of the war, the then-young local historian Serhiy Osachuk discovered them. He immediately realized that this case file was not a mere legal procedure, but a moral indictment of forgetting. Only following his discovery and the recognition of their significance were the documents officially classified as UD (Unique Documents)—the highest protection category for cultural heritage in Ukrainian archives. Although such unique items are usually required to be transferred to Kyiv, the collection remained in Chernivtsi. Based on this, Osachuk, together with the Austrian historian Benjamin Grilj, initiated the international research project to return the voices of Transnistria to the global public. Today, Ukrainian archivists perform extraordinary work under extreme conditions to preserve this heritage as part of international Holocaust remembrance.