Son Gets Father’s Lost Letter

Mishpacha Magazine

Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Bukiet of Kfar Chabad had no idea what was in store when his phone rang in early May. On the line was a Dutch Red Cross Official, asking whether he was the son of Rabbi Chaim Bukiet, a Polish Holocaust survivor who died in 2002. Bukiet answered in the affirmative. “I have a letter for you,” said the official. “It’s been waiting for you for sixty-seven years.”

A letter dated April 25, 1942, was sent to Avraham Shmuel’s father, Rabbi Chaim Bukiet, by his parents in the Warsaw Ghetto. They sent the letter to their son, who had fled to Shanghai at the behest of the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson. In the note, the elder Rabbi Bukiet assured his only son that his parents were “okay.”

Reb Chaim wrote a response, but it never reached its destination. Because no direct mail service was available in or out of the ghetto, letters were “mailed” via the Red Cross. Thus, the original letter from his parents traveled from Warsaw to Geneva to Shanghai, where Reb Chaim scrawled a short note back to his parents – there was a twenty-five word maximum – and sent it back via the same channels.

But by the time his letter reached Europe, Bukiet’s parents as well as R’ Moshe Seitel – the Red Cross official who forwarded the original note – had been murdered at Auschwitz.

In 1946 Reb Chaim received an immigrant visa to the US and left Shanghai to rebuild his life. He died in the US in 2002. Today, Rabbi Avraham Shmuel, Reb Chaim’s son, told Mishpacha his father would have been “excited” to receive the letter.

“He was an only child, and the war remained an open wound for him for the rest of his life,” Avraham Shmuel said. “We never pressured him to talk about it, and of course we never heard about this letter. But he would have been very, very excited to receive it.”

Raymond Schultz, the Red Cross official who discovered the letter, told Mishpacha he had no idea what sort of family treasure he’d unearthed.

“At the end of the day, I happened upon the letter in a Red Cross vault. Usually when that happens, it is nearly impossible to deliver the letter to the original addressees, most of whom were killed during the war or would likely have passed on by now, even if they’d survived.

But Bukiet was an unusual name, so I decided to try contacting a descendant. I looked up the name on the internet, and came up with a grandson, Dovid Zaklikovsky, on a Chabad website. From there, it was easy to find the family.

“It wasn’t really my job [to look for the family], said Schultz. “Something about this case drew me in.”