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Lovely story. It’s always special to read something a loved one wrote so many years ago, to touch the paper he touched, and to imagine how he must have felt. It’s a special connection.

My great-grandfather took a grand tour of Europe in 1910. In those days, it was a tradition for folks of even middle-class means — if you met someone from Europe, you would keep in touch and of course your kid could stay with the family if they ever made it the Continent. And you’d return the favor if their kids ever came to America.

My dad has my ggf’s postcards from that tour, and photos, and descriptions of the wonders he saw all over Europe. I have my great-uncle Jimmy’s letters from Europe, letters he wrote during WWII. Jimmy was my father’s father’s brother, an officer in Army intelligence, and one of the first Yanks to investigate Berchtesgarten. The letters he sent home are on Hitler’s stationery and composed on one of his secretarial pool’s typewriters.

Jimmy was raised on his father’s stories and reminiscences of Europe. Two world wars later, Jimmy was giving his dad updates. Most of the landmarks in his cherished memories were gone forever. The pictures and letters from my great-grandfather and my great-uncle provide a sort of pair of bookends, before and after snapshots of a continent ravaged.

My grandfather didn’t go to Europe. He was 4-F after losing all the fingers on his right hand in a table saw accident in the ‘30s. So he spent the war as a uniformed civilian, an architect and contractor who built airfields for the Navy and the AAF all over Florida. After the war, he moved on to large-scale architecture, mostly hospitals. Including the one in which I was born.

It’s important not just to read the content, but to touch the object. This was in his pocket. This gave him strength and comfort in the darkest days. This gave him the strength to come through that, and to come home and become the man I knew, and loved, and remember. That has to count for something.