Postales del Este

An exciting true story about memory, love, and hope amidst the horror of Auschwitz.

In September 1943, young Ella arrives as a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp from France. The head of the women's camp, the bloodthirsty SS Maria Mandel, nicknamed the Beast, discovers that her calligraphy is perfect and incorporates her as a copyist in the Women's Orchestra. Thanks to her knowledge of languages, Ella begins working in the Kanada Block where she finds numerous postcards and photographs in the luggage of the deportees, and decides to write her stories on them so that no one forgets who they were. As she forms bonds of friendship with the prisoners, survives the evil of her captors and prevents them from discovering her particular resistance made of words, a rebellion brews among the prisoners that further threatens her life and that of the man she loves, Joska.

Almost forty years later, young Bella receives a box full of postcards. "These are postcards your mother wrote when she was in the East. That's what she called them: Postcards from the East. She wanted you to read them in due time. And that time is now."

Combining fiction with historical figures such as Josef Mengele, Heinrich Himmler, Irma Grese, Rudolf Hoss, Anne Frank, and Alma Rosé, Reyes Monforte returns to the genre that has established her as an author. Richly documented and written with passion and emotion, she has signed her most ambitious work: a story about the liberating power of words, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Reviews:
"There is nothing sadder than unread letters. Completely hooked on Postcards from the East."
SARA CARBONERO

"A story of victims and torturers. A novel that honors memory on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp."
CARLOS HERRERA

"The novel absorbed me, with a heavy heart, it left me breathless. It's impossible to stop reading the book, from beginning to end."
IRENE VILLA

"Reyes Monforte offers us an admirable story that speaks to us of the value of memory and words as a balm against horror."
Ángeles López, La Razón