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Cupertino woman pieces together past through family’s letters by Dan Pine staff writer
The letters could have come from any mother anywhere, anytime. “My dear girl,” begins one. “Have you got all your things? Please don’t worry about me, be happy and cheerful … I kiss you from the bottom of my heart.”
But in this case, the letters come from a Jewish woman trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe writing to her 10-year-old daughter living safely in America. A daughter who never saw her mother again.
Phyllis Mattson has called the Bay Area home ever since she arrived here from Austria in 1940. Her first few years in San Francisco were a blur of orphanages and foster homes, but the letters to and from her parents became a lifeline.
Mattson saved every one.
Now, decades later, many of them have been published in Mattson’s memoir “War Orphan in San Francisco” and excerpted in “Don’t Wave Goodbye,” the story of a little-known Kindertransport in which 1,000 Jewish children were sent to America during the Holocaust.
Last October, the Bill Graham Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, held a launch party for “Don’t Wave Goodbye,” attended by several survivors from the American Kindertransport, including Mattson.
“In the first letter I sent to my father, I asked him to save everything,” says Mattson, 75, now a Cupertino-based anthropology professor. “People used to save letters, so maybe it wasn’t such an unusual request. Every time I moved from one location to another, I found the letters and would reread them. They must have given me strength.”
It wasn’t until she was in her 70s that Mattson decided to write a memoir. But it required more work than she initially thought. “It was overwhelming,” she recalls. “There were over 200 letters. I finally put them each in a separate binder by date, then had them translated [from German]. As I worked with them, they seemed to be perfect chapters.”
Born in Vienna in 1929, Felicitas (Phyllis) Finkel enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood until the 1938 Nazi invasion of Austria. A year later, her parents shipped her off to America. Her mother stayed behind, ending up in labor camps and ultimately murdered. Her father rode out the war years incarcerated in Britain and Australia. Scattered across the globe, the three (along with extended family members) communicated by letter.
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ISBN 0-9761656-1-9; Second edition, $19.95
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