Mail to the Other Side
by Hannelore · 12 July 2026 · Historical Fiction
Set in Lübeck after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the story follows Frau Suhr, a postal worker who continues her daily route past the Reetz family home even when no letters can get through, hoping to sustain the mother's hope. Through a clandestine chain of intermediaries, she relays a message from the son in East Berlin and delivers it only by word of mouth to protect everyone involved. The mother dies before her son Matthias finally returns in 1988, three years too late.
Frau Suhr had already been in postal service for twenty years by 1961, and delivered mail in the district where the Reetz family lived. The Reetzes had a son in East Berlin, Matthias, who wrote every month, dutifully, formulaically, because he knew someone was reading along. On the morning of August 13th, no letter came, because that morning nobody knew anymore whether there was still mail at all. The border had been closed overnight — with barbed wire first, with a wall later.
Frau Reetz stood at her garden gate every day at half past nine, because that was the time Frau Suhr usually came. She stood there in September, in October. Frau Suhr, who knew no more mail was getting through, kept walking past that house anyway, every day, same time, empty-handed, because she thought: if I stop coming, she'll give up hope even faster.
In November, Frau Suhr wrote a letter herself. Not as a postal official. As a woman living in the neighborhood. She wrote to a colleague in West Berlin, who passed the message along through inter-zone channels, through detours, through three cities: that the Reetz family was well, that the mother stood at the door every day. It took four months for an answer to come back, rerouted just as many times, in an envelope with no return address, just the words: "I am alive. I am waiting too."
Frau Suhr never handed that letter to the Reetzes — only spoke it aloud, word for word, at the garden gate, because a letter that had changed hands so many times would have been dangerous for everyone involved if it were found. Frau Reetz stood at that door every day for four years, until she became too ill. Matthias Reetz didn't come to Lübeck until 1988, three years after his mother's death.
Frau Suhr retired in 1979, after thirty-eight years of service. The Reetzes' garden gate now belongs to someone else, a young couple who know nothing of 1961. Only the route itself remains, the same streets in the same order, carried now by someone new who has no idea how many sentences have already been spoken along that path that never once appeared in a letter.
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