Having to bid farewell to her only son and his new wife, Selma felt torn between sadness and relief. She wrote Nanna, who had been in the United States for six months: “Our children are now getting ready to leave. When you receive this letter they will soon arrive in Palestine, God willing. I am so relieved that they found an interim solution. It had been a very stressful time with lots of upheaval and a hectic pace. We hardly managed to sit together for an hour.” With her last child leaving Germany Selma's lugubrious sigh, “Now all I have left of you are your letters,” echoed a frequently used expression among German Jews at the time. The sense of having to replace, at least temporarily, the immediate personal contact with postal exchanges was often accompanied by the hope that this painful separation would pass quickly.

Of the more than 170,000 Jews in Germany at the outbreak of the war, 32 percent were over 60. By 1941 about two-thirds of Jews in Germany were past middle age, with a disproportionately high number of women remaining. Historian Marion Kaplan concludes that for older women “age, even more than being female, worked against a timely flight; together they were lethal.” In 1939 the members of the extended family remaining in Germany were almost exclusively elderly, and mostly female, although there were also a few couples and two 69-year-old men, the bachelor Onkel Hermann and Karl Kaufmann, the widower of Selma and Henny's younger sister, Paula.