"Letter from the past" is a graphic novel by Anastasiia Yeremitsa (Ukraine), Nadiia Boshtan (Ukraine), Uliana Kostetskaia (Moldova), Timur Moroz (Ukraine), Sophie Mildner (Germany), and Luis Hundsdorfer (Germany).
Based on the Centropa interview with Esfir Dener, their graphic novel focuses on what the students concluded to be the key aspects of Esfir Dener’s life: resilience, humanity, and literature.
Esfir Borisovna Dener was born in 1925 into a Jewish family in Falesti, Bessarabia (Moldova), where she spent a culturally rich childhood with her siblings before her life was upended by World War II. After losing her home under Soviet rule, she and her family were deported to a labor camp in Siberia, where they endured years of hardship, displacement, and separation. In the postwar years, despite continued political repression, imprisonment, and exile, Esfir pursued an education, became an engineer, rebuilt her life in the Soviet Union, and eventually settled in Kishinev, where she remained connected to Jewish community life, carrying forward resilience in the face of profound personal loss and historical upheaval.