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For all the talk and legitimate concern about the future of journalism, it’s heartening when one realizes the continuing impact, and reach, of the written word.

Case in point: I wrote a column this past week about a little-known “hidden synagogue” found in the barracks of the Terezin concentration camp near Prague. The piece mentioned that, though forbidden, a German Jew named Arthur Berlinger sought to sanctify the space for prayer by inscribing the walls with passages from the Hebrew prayers and drawing Shabbat candles and Jewish stars.

Berlinger and his wife perished in Auschwitz, but I was told that the couple’s two daughters were sent on kindertransports to England and survived the war. Our guide did not know any other details about them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received an e-mail last night from one of the daughters, now a grandmother in Southfield, Michigan. Rosie Baum, nee Berlinger, thanked me for the article, and wrote that she has been blessed with a large family - children and grandchildren - all following in her father’s footsteps. “So in the end,” she wrote, “Hitler did not succeed in destroying Jewry, just as no one ever will.”

Moved by her letter, I called her this morning - she had included her phone number - and learned that she came to England at the age of 10 in April 1938, and her sister arrived that July. The sister remained in England and died several years ago.

Mrs. Baum married and moved to the U.S. She explained that her daughter had seen and sent her my article.

Mrs Baum said she and her parents were in touch on a daily basis by mail from April to September 3,1938, and that she even received several letters from her parents from Terezin.

Since the war’s end, Terezin has been associated with children’s drawings done there, many of which are on display, and with the phrase, drawing and theatrical play, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.”

Mrs. Baum noted that her father was an artist and teacher, and that while she cannot prove it, “I know in my bones” that he encouraged children at Terezin to draw butterflies since they were among his favorite images, because “they are free to fly where they want.”

I am grateful to have been in touch with her, making my recent visit to Terezin all the more poignant, and real.

It is only fitting to note, in this week of Yom HaShoah and Holocaust remembrance, that the open secret about the German people’s knowledge of the fate of European Jewry during the war years has come to light.

Benjamin Schwartz, literary editor of The Atlantic, writes in the May issue of the magazine that, based on recent, major research into life in Nazi Germany, it is increasingly clear that “contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.”

His essay, based on four new serious books on the Nazi era in Germany, asserts that “from the very onset of the war, it was impossible not to know the Jews’ fate.” The historians describe how soldiers spoke to family and friends of the mass killings, railway staff knew of the special trains going to the concentration camps, and Nazi leaders spoke openly about their policy to exterminate Jews, though no details of implementation were ever mentioned.

“The Final Solution” was “too vast in scale and scope to be comprehended fully,” Schwartz writes, but it was also “too vast to be kept secret.” He quotes Ian Kershaw, who writes in his new study, “Hitler, The Germans and The Final Solution,” that: “Only those anxious to shut their ears…could have been utterly ignorant. And only the willfully ignorant could have imagined a drastically different fate for the Jews than was actually in store for them.”

Studies indicate that about five percent of the German population favored exterminating the Jews and an equal percentage completely opposed anti-Semitism. Twenty-one percent showed “a degree of moral sensibility (advocating, for example, a future Jewish state)” and 69 percent showed indifference to the fate of the Jews.

According to Schwartz, the realization that their army was murdering Jewish civilians in great numbers spurred citizens and Nazi leaders alike to push forward with the war effort, recognizing the terrible price they would pay should they be defeated and the facts of the genocide become known.

“We’ve burned our bridges behind us,” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, told the German people in 1943. “We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or the greatest criminals.”

More than six decades later, that legacy is not in question.