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These letters have already been characterized as “UD“ and are thus in danger of disappearing. Usually the cipher “UD“ (unique document) implies, that relevant files are stored for safekeeping especially - further access is usually restricted. Apart from the issue of availability the technical and practical factors of conservation apply additionally: because of the precarious financial situation of Ukraine it is not likely that the documents are being kept within an adequate environment regarding constant humidity and temperature, so biological decay is just a question of time. This relates especially to specific files within a particular scale, since these distress calls were drawn on every available scrap of paper.

These letters - that were intercepted by the Romanian gendarmerie - are in most instances appeals to family and friends asking for money to survive. They present a picture of the situation in Transnistria at that time - unsurpassed in hardness and credibility.

Transnistria, in Western Europe almost exclusively known only by specialists, is the region between Dniester, Bug and the Black Sea, which Hitler assigned to his allied military dictator Antonescu as loot in August 1941. Subsequently the name Transnistria got the epitome of pure terror - mainly for the Jewish population of Romania, Bessarabia and the northern Bucovina: Deportations, pogroms, mass executions, death by maltreatment, hunger, cold or typhus-epidemic in ghettos and death camps. Nowadays solitary names like Bogdanovka, Achmetschetka, Domanevka or Pechora can hardly be identified as concentration camps by the public, unlike Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Treblinka or Lublin, which apply as topos of the Shoah.

Within those the three years before the liberation by the Red Army in the summer 1944 145.000 to 410.000 people died here - the number varies since it is hard to determine nowadays how many have already been deported 1940 and 1941 by the soviet NKVD, how many people were killed during the advance of the 11th German as well as the 3rd and 4th Romanian army, how many people died in the massacres in the Bucovina and Bessarabia and how many people did not survive the death marches attended by the SD, SS and the Romanian Gendarmes. Along with this institutional terror, the deadly attacks by the German-, Ukrainian- and Romanian-speaking civilian population must not be forgotten.

488 pages unimaginable human suffering.

The authors turned desperately to relatives (“Dear Sister“ File II, Kov. 59), friends (“My dear Titus“ File II, Konv. 93) and finally acquaintances (“Dear Sir schoolmaster“ File I, Konv. 36), who remained in their home communities, and were trying to achieve help - without success because of restraints by the gendarmes at the railroad station Chernivci. “Dear Papa! I have already written you several times and it surprises me, that we have no sign of life from you. We are trying in every possible way to send you letters and to gain slightest help“ (File I, Konv. 25). Despair and distress is reflected not only on the texture layer, it is also reflected by the choice of material - basically everything available has been used: ordinary paper, cardboard, posters, timetables, and shopping- and attendance-records of the camps itself.

These records draw a personal picture of the living conditions in those days, but also illustrate the repression - then in force fee for instance: 1942 in Transnistria a stamp costs 5 Lei, a loaf of bread 500 and to ransom someone 250.000 - in the rest of Romania the price for bread was 8 Lei (cf. V. Axenciuc: Istoric Monetar, 2005). .