Long-forgotten cache of letters inspires niece to lay out his story
One of Debra Farrar-Parkman’s childhood memories from the 1960s is walking with her mother to visit a Blue Hill Avenue tailor shop where she noticed that one of the tailors had a series of numbers written on his skin.
“Why doesn’t he just write them on paper?” Farrar-Parkman recalls thinking to herself. “When I asked my mother afterwards, she said ‘Why don’t you talk to your uncle?’”
Her uncle was Reed Edwin Peggram, a native Bostonian who travelled to Europe in the late 1930s as fascism was taking hold across the continent. A gay Black man, Peggram, and his partner, were captured while living in Italy in 1941 and imprisoned for two years in a concentration camp until their liberation by advancing Allied forces.
“He never went into deep, deep detail about what he experienced, but he told me those are the numbers they put on Jewish people during the war,” Farrar-Parkman said.
Her uncle survived the terrors of his imprisonment and the war before returning to Boston, where he lived until his death from a heart attack in 1982. And while Peggram was reticent about talking too much about his ordeal, a trove of his letters stored in a basement storage bin survived the decades.
Now, Farrar-Parkman (above), who worked as a television producer for about 20 years, is working on a film project to bring her uncle’s story to a broad audience.
Titled “The Final Letter,” the 30-minute docudrama will be released as part of Mass Humanities’ “Unheard Voices of the American Revolution 250th anniversary” series in June. Narrated by Farrar-Parkman herself, it includes interviews with her brother, Tarik, and the writer and professor Ethelene Whitmire, the author of “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love,” a book that will be published next month.
Her uncle’s letters and Farrar-Parkman’s research are a big part of the storytelling, which begins here in Boston and Harvard University, where Peggram was a doctoral student before setting off to study abroad in Europe.
His was a story of love against the backdrop of war. According to his account, Peggram and his partner, Gerdh Hauptmann, a scholar from Denmark, were “outed” as gay lovers, apparently by “his landlady’s relatives who wanted the room,” Farrar-Parkman said during an interview at the Flat Black coffee shop not far from her Dorchester home. “They went to the authorities and said these two men are living together in a room with one bed.”
The couple were seized and eventually shipped to the Bagni Di Lucca camp near Pistoia, Italy, where both Jews and other prisoners like Peggram and Hauptmann— gay men— were interned.
“My uncle did say to my brother that Italian concentration camps were not as severe as the German concentration camps,” noted Farrar-Parkman.
After two years of captivity, the couple were liberated by the US 92nd Infantry Division after Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943.
Big parts of her uncle’s story — long missing from the family’s understanding— were revealed about 20 years ago when Farrar-Parkman found a big round metal tub in her mother’s basement. Inside were some 180 letters that Peggram wrote to document his experience.
Over months of study, she saw the missing pieces of her uncle’s long-ago story coming together sentence by sentence.
“I interviewed my brother as the family spokesperson,” said Farrar-Parkman. “Ethelene [Whitmere] speaks about what Europe was like at the time. What it was like for African Americans, and what it was like for gay people.”
The film’s budget is $50,000, and to date, more than $32,000 has been raised through an online donor appeal.
“The Final Letter” project is so relevant to what is going on today that the story must be told now; it needs to be told now,” said Farrar-Parkman. “Those themes of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia exist today. It’s passing on from century to century.”
A free screening of the film will be shown at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design this summer and Farrar-Parkman hopes it will make its way into other film festivals. Eventually, she would like to make a full-length feature film or documentary relating Peggram’s entire life-story.
“One thing I am going to do after the public screening is follow it up with a panel discussion,” she said. The panel will feature representatives from the African American, Jewish, and LGBTQ communities. “This is an opportunity for people to really begin to have honest and deep conversations and not be afraid to have them. This past year, people have been really afraid to say and be.”
She added: “I hope that it brings people together to talk about these issues to determine what they are going to do in society to combat these things. How do you combat racism? How do you combat homophobia and antisemitism? When we are doing that, we are bringing people together.
“It’s an opportunity for people to see and understand our commonalities and how we need to be better people. We need to be more humane. We definitely need to be better people.”
To donate to “The Final Letter” project visit donorbox.org/the-final-letter.
