Born in Wetzlar, Hans Rosenthal (1919–1973) was one of around 370 young people who participated in agricultural training at the Gross-Breesen Training Farm between 1936 and 1942. This non-Zionist institution, which was established and run by the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany), was located north of Breslau (Wrocław). It offered an alternative to the Hakhshara farms that aimed to prepare young Jews for emigration to Mandatory Palestine. During the November Pogroms in 1938, Rosenthal or ‘Juwa,’ as he was called by the other trainees, was arrested along with the head of the farm, Curt Bondy (1894–1972), the farm’s Jewish staff members, and Rosenthal’s peers of legal age, all of whom were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. In the spring of 1939, Rosenthal and his parents were finally able to emigrate to Brazil, where his father, while still in Germany, had purchased land in Rolândia in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. The excerpt from the letter dated 1 October 1939 is from the seventh ‘Rundbrief an die alten Gross-Breesener’ (Circular to the Former Gross-Breesen Trainees) dated January 1940. These circulars were compiled at irregular intervals from the letters of former Gross-Breesen trainees.

At first, the circulars also included reports from the training farm. They were intended not only to maintain a connection and sense of community among the former trainees, who had been scattered all over the world as a result of emigration and flight. By intensifying this mutual experience, the circulars served to strengthen a sense of identity. For 65 years, from 1938 to 2003, they offered an important forum for mutual exchange. Over the decades, they thus developed into a testimony of the former Gross-Breesen trainees’ divergent paths through life and constituted a paradigmatic mirror of the transnational character of the German-Jewish diaspora. Dating from the early phase of their history, Rosenthal’s letter shows through its detailed description of the climactic conditions and agricultural methods in Rolândia that the young authors shared their experience and knowledge regarding various geographic circumstances and agricultural forms with one another and thereby mutually supported each other in establishing new lives in their respective countries of refuge.