Paula Balkin correspondence

Paula Balkin correspondence is comprised of letters between Balkin and her family and friends. Letters and postcards document the lives of Paula Balkin; her parents Abraham (Otto) and Gertrude (Trude) Grünbaum and her sister Edith; Balkin’s grandmother Rose Schmulewitz; Balkin’s uncle and aunt Leo and Eva Schmulewitz; Balkin’s uncle and aunt Abraham (Adolf) and Clara (Clärchen) Koppold and their children Harold, Siegmar, and Zilla; Balkin’s aunt Yette Ribetzki Pietrkowski and her daughter Vera; and family friends Marjane Mitdank and Johanna (Hanni or Hans) Wagner in Leipzig. Most of the correspondence dating from 1939‐1941 is addressed to Balkin and her sister and cousins and comes from her parents, aunts and uncles, and grandmother. The letters relate the family’s experiences in Leipzig and efforts to emigrate, and they trace Balkin’s parents’ movement from Leipzig to Budapest and Salonika. Many of these letters have multiple addressees and multiple signatories as family members would use the opportunity to include several messages in a single piece of correspondence. The correspondence dating from 1946‐1948 documents Balkin’s efforts to locate her parents. Family friends Marjane Mitdank and Hanni Wagner describe their own experiences in Leipzig during the war, relate the experiences of the Schmulewitz, Grünbaum, and Koppold families during the war, and contribute to the search for information about their fates. They relate the deportation of Adolf Koppold to Sachsenhausen and the deportation of Rose Schmulewitz, Clärchen Koppold, and Yette Ribetzki Pietrkowski to Riga. The later letters also include correspondence from Arnold Levy about securing an appropriate home for Siegmar Koppold, correspondence from the Becker family who were relatives of the Koppold family, and correspondence from the American Red Cross indicating that Abraham Grünbaum died in Dachau and that Gertrude Grünbaum could not be traced. Paula Balkin was born Paula Grünbaum in 1924 to Abraham (Otto) and Gertrude (Trude) Grünbaum (nee Schmulewitz). On June 15, 1939, she was part of a Kindertransport to London, England. Her cousin Vera had already arrived in England, her sister Edith joined her in July, and her cousins Harold, Siegmar, and Zilla Koppold followed shortly thereafter. In 1947 Balkin immigrated to the United States, and in 2002 she published a book about her experiences, Strong Family Ties: A Story in Letters.