My mother's letters arrived in boxes 2 years ago, a year after she died. I haven't counted yet, but clearly at least a thousand she'd treasured from the 1930s through World War II, through all her years living abroad to her return to the US with her crew of two daughters and a husband. Reading what her mother wrote her in April 1944 from Spartanburg, South Carolina, that her father thought the war would end May Day, but that she'd heard Dr. Benes (the President of the Czech government in exile in the UK) said he thought it would last at least until the fall, reading this sitting in my house in Prague where Dr. Benes returned after the war to try to lead Czechoslovakia recently liberated from the Nazis, gave me a chill.
