Documentation after the
Holocaust
After World War II, with hundreds of thousands of Jews scattered
throughout Europe and millions having been murdered, attempts were made
to identify the living and the dead so that survivors could locate
relatives and friends and know the fate of those who perished. Lists of
displaced persons were developed as early as 1943, but the burden of
collecting information about both survivors and victims fell upon the
International Tracing Service of the International Committee of the Red
Cross. This organization still is active and receives thousands of
inquiries each year. It is estimated that they hold more than 40
million index cards that record information about specific individuals.
After World War II, the remnant of European Jewry published yizkor
books--memorial books--to document and remember the towns and
townspeople destroyed in the Holocaust. To date, more than one thousand
such works have been published. They include articles written by
survivors and often provide a great deal of information about specific
individuals from the town.
Yad Vashem, the principal repository in the world of Holocaust
documentation, in 1955 started a global effort to document each
individual murdered in the Holocaust. They asked people with knowledge
of these victims to provide Pages of Testimony vouching that the named
person was a Holocaust victim. To date, some three million Pages of
Testimony are on file at the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Consequently, half of the six million victims have been documented
individually through this manuscript collection. The Hall of Names is
their cemetery and the Pages of Testimony are their tombstones.
Lists of victims by country, region or camp have been compiled since
the war. Best known is the Gedenkbuch,
a list of 128,000 German Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It was
compiled by the German government from surviving records of the war. A
comparable book exists for all Dutch Jews. Some compiled lists are for
regions (for example, Hajdu County, Hungary), cities (for example,
Frankfurt am Main) and camps (for example, Theresienstadt).
Locating
Survivors Today
Historically, Jews have banded together for mutual benefit and
protection. International and national Jewish social service
organizations, such as the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society (HIAS), helped Holocaust survivors relocate in countries that
accepted refugees after World War II. Most of these organizations kept
records of the individuals they helped, and some records are accessible
to the public. When Jews emigrated from Europe around the turn of the
century, they formed landsmanshaftn societies in their new lands that
centered around their towns of origin. When Holocaust survivors left
Europe, they joined existing societies or created their own new
societies. Many of these groups still exist today. Even if they do not,
their records have survived and may provide clues to help locate
survivors.
Writing to
Holocaust Resource Sites
Most facilities do not have the human resources to accommodate requests
to do research. You may get them to do the research for you if your
request is so specific that it will take them little time to
accommodate you. For example, a request to the Yad Vashem archives that
you are "looking for information about a Tobias Mokotowski, born about
1900, who lived in Otwock, Poland, before the Holocaust" probably will
illicit a polite response that the archives' holdings for the town of
Otwock are so extensive, and their human resources are so limited, that
it is impossible for them to do the research. However, the following
request was processed: "According to the Guide to Unpublished Materials of the
Holocaust Period,
your record group M-1/DN-28/2 contains a list of Jews who lived in
Otwock, Poland. Could you please check if there are any persons named
Mokotowski on the list." Note that this second request is very
specific, identifying where they must go within the archives to locate
the information requested.
What if you do not know the exact name of the person? Some facilities
will do generic searches, but only on unusual names. Examples are "all
persons named Mokotow" or "all persons named Szare from Kalisz." If you
are searching for Cohen, you must be more specific. If you are
searching for Jacob Cohen, the name is so common that you may have to
provide more specific information than just the name.
It is acceptable to write to foreign facilities in your native
language. The response may be in their native language. We are now an
international community. It is always possible to find someone in your
area who can translate the response to your inquiry no matter in which
language it is written.
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