adjective
1 a: following all the rest
b: being the only remaining
2: belonging to the final stage (as of life)
See the fact that this is a collection at all makes the entire occurrence feel more real in a way. The concept of “Last” in most cases are a sign of moving on, or ending an activity. For example, “Hey, here’s the last excersise we’ll do before class is dismissed.” Then there are times the people on TV in movies are like, “I’ll get you back if it’s the last thing I do”. It alludes to death, but doesn’t really come through with it most the time. We use ‘last’ a lot in our daily lives as the first noted adjective definition: “following all the rest”.
In this case, this “last” stamps a sense of finality, because as people in the 21st century, we know what happened in the holocaust. We know that these people- these people who wrote these letters are dead. We know more than the people receiving these letters did. Just reading the letters knowing this fact makes us look at the letters under a different lense. But for the receivers, they were probably hopeful as Léo Cohn wrote in his letter to his son, “ all I can do is send you this little note, this small sign of life. “ Not knowing it would be the last sign of life his son would receive from him. The letter he wrote was titled on the website as “Last Birthday Wishes”, again a sense of finality. He was deported a mere 5 day later, before the birthday of his son.
Though, perhaps he did know he was going to die “We will see each other soon, I hug you lovingly,”. Soon can be a reference to ‘heaven’ more than a physical reunion.
For us in the 21st C, that could be a goodbye in an of itself, him knowing he was going to die before the next letter. Or it could have been just a genuine, normal ending to a letter. Context of reading is important.
