Giulia sat hunched over her laptop at her messy kitchen table. A cup of hot coffee steamed beside her. She flipped the letter over that she had been translating, one of many over the past three years. A box of her mother's letters and memorabilia had sat collecting dust for over two decades before Giulia had dared to open them. They documented her mother's glamorous, yet tumultuous life with artists and writers of the Vienna coffee houses in the 1930's.

Running a finger over the faded handwriting, she paused to look up a word in the heavy German-English dictionary that sat open on the table. Then she typed a full sentence onto the computer document in front of her.

"Ma!" yelled her daughter from the loft. "I found something you need to see."

Giulia closed the dictionary and grabbed her walking stick. Slowly she hobbled to the living room. 

"What?" she asked her daughter, leaning heavily on the stick and craning her neck up.

"Come up here," her daughter replied. Giulia's daughter Suzy had tasked herself with cleaning out the attic crawl space where 13 years earlier they had stashed Giulia's aunt's belongs when she'd died. 

Suzy must have found something important or she wouldn't have asked Guilia to climb the treacherous spiral staircase to the loft.

Giulia set down her walking stick, a necessity since she'd had polio as a child, and climbed on hands and knees precariously up the stairs. When she reached the small loft, covered in a thick orange shag run she was out of breath and looked expectantly at her daughter. 

Suzy sat kneeling in front of an open trunk, sifting through papers. It was a large trunk, the kind people used to travel to and from Europe with when travel was mostly via steamer rather than airplane. Giulia crawled over and peered inside. Filling the trunk were more family letters, hundreds and hundreds of letters. The number paled in comparison to those Giulia's mother Mia had kept. 

It made sense. Mia had fled from the Nazi's as a Jew in 1938, taking Giulia to a foster home in Switzerland before escaping herself to England and then to America. Her sister Gusti, Giulia's aunt, had left for New York City many years before sensing things might get bad. Gusti had taken with her the family's silver and dishes in case conditions deteriorated in Europe. Gusti had a complete set of letters that spanned over 70 years.

"It looks like you aren't going to run out of letters to translate anytime soon," laughed Suzy. 

Giulia pawed through the trunk, and chuckled herself.

"No," she replied. "I need a cigarette, though."