October 14th, 1946 putting ink on paper
can be powerful. My dearest Mrs Saba,
this 73 year old sheet of stationary
really captures the humanity of history.
But it is a letter that might
have been lost forever.
Well, I've always enjoyed history
if it weren't for Tim Mallon.
There's nothing black and white
about the Second World War. The
story starts when he got this desk
at an estate sale years ago, so
we carried it upstairs.
They were rattling.
As you can see, they were rattling.
I went and had my drill and
was going to actually write.
Don't think the hole
might even still be there.
Started to drill right here.
And I thought, well,
that's strange.
I wonder why they're loose.
And I gave it a tug.
It was a hidden compartment,
and inside Tim found a passport and
fading letters that once belonged to
a woman whose name was Helen Seba.
They were in German, but they were
marked to addresses in England,
but they were written during
the war. Missus Seba and her husband
fled to England before the war.
That's them in front of the.
Very desk that is now in Tim's Dallas office,
with those letters still tucked away inside.
From time to time when somebody that was
German would come through or was older,
I would ask people to look at them
and read them, and I was getting
a sense that something really
bad had happened.
See the advances comfort.
You can hardly imagine the joy
we felt when hearing from you.
It is just so sad that it had to be
under such horrible circumstances.
It was Jane Seymour though,
the actress who finally pushed
him to get them translated.
He happened to sit next to her
on a flight a few years ago.
The letters came up in conversation,
and she urged him to finally
find out what they said.
Turns out it is a haunting story.
A woman named Olga wrote
the letters to Missus Zeba.
Olga was a refugee,
and missus Zebo's brother was
a doctor named Willy Weiss,
who took Olga in at his
family's apartment in Germany,
and her letters detailed their
brutality of what advancing
Russian soldiers did.
German civilians in the final
days of World War Two.
They found the family in
the basement they raped.
The wife and made Helen's brother
watch as his wife was raped and they
had taken they had a young daughter,
13 years old, and they had put her in a
burlap sack and doctor Weiss sat on her.
And pretended she was a chair
while they raped his wife.
Continuously the Soviets entered,
looted and took possession of
the young girls. They were
particularly crazy about Ullah. What
she wrote next though is the hardest to hear.
The Russians kicked the door down
and they grabbed the little girl.
Her name was Allah.
Basically she was raped multiple
times and they brought her back
and they threw her in the house and
said we're coming back in 1/2 hour.
There are other guys you know
that are coming for you.
And she said, Daddy, I want to die.
Daddy, please kill me.
But your family, in despair,
grabbed the one thing they had
always planned potassium cyanide.
Death came in a flash, and I envied it.
It is somewhere between nausea and
intense pain, and it hurt your heart
to read it. Everybody who chose to
end their life, more than 500 people
were all picked up and buried in mass
graves. The local Red Cross made it
official, identifying the remains
of Doctor Weiss and his wife with
their 13 year old daughter. Up
until last year, the Weisses
didn't have a name anymore.
None of them did.
They no longer existed.
They were three people in a mass grave.
In a way, we've given three
people their name back,
Mrs Siba. I have now probably just
about answered all questions.
Olga's words carefully detail the
cruelty of war and one family
who history might have forgotten.
I guess there's still a lot to say,
but you can only do that by talking
if Tim Mallett hadn't discovered those
hidden letters that Mrs Seba saved.
In Dallas, I'm Jason Whiteley.