In a letter from September 12, 2003, Oskar’s grandmother writes to him to tell him the story of how she married his grandfather. One day in the early 1920s, Oskar’s grandmother (who was just a child at the time) came home to find a letter addressed to the house, dated over a decade prior, from a man who was a prisoner of war in Turkey. Most of the letter was censored, and it was clear that the man did not know whom he was writing to, but just wanted to reach out to someone. Oskar’s grandmother wanted to investigate the man in the letter, but knowing she could not do that, she decided instead to learn more about the people she knew, having each of them write a letter to her.

Oskar’s grandmother knew Thomas Schell (Oskar’s grandfather) when they were just teenagers. She would watch him kissing her older sister, Anna, and found a sort of excitement in living through her sister. Oskar’s grandmother asked Thomas to write a letter for her at that time, and in it he expressed his dreams of marrying Anna and becoming a sculptor. Seven years later, Oskar’s grandmother saw Thomas at a bakery and nervously approached him.