Letter on the Issuance of a Death Certificate and the Return of a Rehabilitation Record

This letter was received by my grandmother in 1994.

More than fifty years had passed since the arrest and disappearance of her father.

Until that moment, the family had not received a single official document about his fate.

The letter states that a death certificate for Alexander Ivanovych Gass will be sent.

It also notes that a copy of his rehabilitation record is being returned to the family.

The text is written in a standard official form.

It contains no explanations or details.

It merely records the fact that the documents are being sent.

For the family, this was the first official letter confirming that the case had been reviewed and that the death had been formally registered by state authorities.

This document was received in the first years of independent Ukraine, when archival files of repressed people began to be opened to their families.

At that time, it finally became possible to obtain materials that had remained inaccessible for decades.

The letter does not report the circumstances of death.

It contains no assessments or commentary.

It simply performs its function — transmitting information.

Together with it, documents that had been stored in archival files for many years were returned to the family.

I am publishing this letter as part of our family archive.

As evidence of how, in the 1990s, families first began to receive official answers in cases of repression.

Source: private family archive of the Gass family