Helen Waldstein Wilkes' book Letters from the Lost is in the TOP 5 for Alberta Readers' Choice Award

Alberta Readers' Choice Award The Alberta Readers’ Choice (ARC) Award committee is excited to announce the five books competing for the $10,000 award – one of Alberta’s richest literary prizes. During a flurry of deliberations, the five ARC Award Book Champions each selected a book to defend throughout the month-long online voting period, which opens to the public on May 1.

Go and place your vote on the ARC web page today!

Why is Sharon Budnarchuk the book's champion? This is what Sharon has to say about the book: "This is a very moving story about the holocaust, immigration to Canada, denial, survival, and guilt. Helen Wilkes fled Czechoslovakia with her parents in 1939 at the age of two. At the age of sixty, she finally opened her father's red Eaton's box full of letters from family in Europe. She discovered a family she never knew, never talked about, and a history of daily life under the Nazis. Translating the letters was not enough, so she embarked on a journey back to Europe to piece together the family history and learn about her grandparents, her aunties, uncles, and cousins, and what happened to each of them. It is a rather unique approach to the telling of a holocaust story. Along with the letters, photographs and maps, is Helen's Canadian immigration story. The family ran a farm in Southern Ontario to fulfil their visa requirements. But anti-Semitism was strong in Canada at the time and her family hid their Jewish roots and even sent Helen to Sunday School. It was difficult to read how our Canadian government failed to act quickly to help the Jewish people before and during the war. This is an important book we all need to read to remind ourselves that the victims of these kinds of horrors, which continue today in the Ivory Coast, are made up of people like us: children, grandparents, brothers and sisters, cousins and friends, who all deserve better in the name of humanity."