"I am alive and I am free. After three torturous years I am back to being a man like all others. The German bastards have murdered my entire family. Lyuba and Arik are no longer with me. I still hope to find them."
Hirsh Brik (father of future Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak), Kovno, September 1944
"While probing around for the fate of my relatives here in Belgium, I encountered Mr. Mendel Toder, a relative of yours. I promised him that I would inform you that, by God’s grace, the following are safe and sound: Mendel, Chava, Miriam, Rosele, and Mother […] May God privilege me with delivering much good news to my fellow sons of Israel and may we merit full redemption soon.”
British soldier Moshe Kasser, December 1944
These two quotes, taken from After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters after the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2016), succinctly illustrate the desperate need by survivors and their relatives to receive news of who was still alive – and who was not – in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
In mid-December 2018, the Diana Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of the Holocaust, part of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research, held a two-day international workshop entitled "Searching for Each Other: Survivors' Attempts in the Postwar Period to Locate Missing Relatives and Friends." Researchers hailing from Israel, Hungary, Romania, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States gave a wide overview of the topic, including the establishment of formal tracing bureaus as well as survivor-led initiatives and the creation of local and regional informal networks in the effort to spread and receive news of survivors in the chaos of the early postwar period.
In her lecture on "First Letters as an Avenue of Locating Missing Relatives," the co-author of After So Much Pain and Anguish and Director of the Research Institute Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto agreed. "The acts of searching and finding cast the survivors in an active position and returned to them a sense of agency – even though most of the searches led to devastating news or no news at all. By telling the world of their survival, as well as including descriptions of their wartime and postwar experiences, the survivors were beginning their long journey towards coming to terms with the magnitude of their loss and beginning to rebuild their new lives."
Dr. Nidam-Orvieto pointed out that many of the first letters, which were all gleaned from the Yad Vashem Archives as well as its ongoing "Gathering the Fragments" project, included lists of those known to the writer to have died, as well as those joyfully understood to be alive. Some survivors, as well as Jewish soldiers in Europe, even found themselves becoming the relaters of news concerning people they did not know, simply in order to be able to pass the tidings on to those searching for their own relatives and friends. "Despite often devastating rumors that circulated amongst the survivors and their relatives abroad, they kept the hope alive that they would eventually be reunited with their loved ones."
Dr. Emunah Nachmany-Gafny, an independent researcher living in Israel, gave a moving presentation on cases of children searching for relatives – and vice-versa – in Poland after the war. In most cases, she pointed out, those caring for the children during the war, as well as other adults searching for them, were crucial to the child's postwar fate. Information reaching Eretz Israel was publicized and leads passed on to local entities and Jewish organizations acting in Europe. This process sometimes led to the child's redemption from his or her adoptive home, despite the often-painful separation this entailed – although, she argued, ultimately most of the children remained with their rescuers.
Serafima (Sima) Velkovich, from the Reference and Information Department in Yad Vashem's Archives Division, covered the modern-day challenges of locating information on survivors – which in rare situations have led to reunions between siblings, cousins and more distant relatives after decades of separation. Utilizing digitized records and lists, Velkovich is often stymied by changes of birthdates, locations and even variations of names for survivors and victims, depending on their location at the time the information was given. For example, many concentration camp inmates would adjust their dates of birth in order to survive selections, or survivors would give alternative home addresses in DP camps to avoid being transferred back to the postwar USSR. Velkovich always keeps in mind clues as to the real identity of people as they progressed through the war – using photos (if available), Russian/Jewish variations of names, and even certain kinds of phraseology to decipher the real meaning behind information given to the relevant authorities.
"Yad Vashem's extensive databases play a central role in my work, along with any source that may help – including phone directories and Facebook – to enable me to track down as much information as possible."
Not always did the search for survivors lead to positive actions. Agnela Boone of the Free University of Amsterdam gave an intriguing account of "Operation Black Tulip" – the devastating postwar policy by the Dutch Ministry of Justice to deport and expropriate all German and Austrian nationals from the Netherlands as "enemies of the state." Many of the "exportees" were themselves Jewish, victims of Nazi persecution, who now found themselves "triply persecuted" by the Dutch government, which re-interned them in camps – sometimes even alongside their former Nazi guards. A significant amount of the records pertaining to this operation are still unavailable – they were either destroyed or remain closed.
Some of the researchers tackled the history and motivation of the various tracing services after the war. Dr. Tehilla Malka Darmon of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev looked at the political aspects of these organizations – the sheer numbers of missing persons after the war and the uncertainty of their fates called for governments to search for solutions beyond the private sphere. Dr. Christian Hoschler of the International Tracing Service (ITS) gave a detailed history of the early efforts of both survivors and centralized bureaus to find missing relatives and friends. While many survivors in the DP camps took matters into their own hands in the frenzied postwar period – issuing certificates and making lists in order to publicize the knowledge they had collated – within a few years this activity had been swallowed up by the larger, more centralized organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the regional offices of the International Red Cross, which eventually gave way to the ITS in Bad Arolsen, central-western Germany. Dr. Verena Buser of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin-Brandenburg outlined the unprecedented difficulties faced by the postwar search bureaus, as survivors were not stationary – they moved around the continent in search of missing relatives and, often, wartime friends. "One of the things we failed utterly to predict was the resilience of human beings," she quoted Eileen Blacky, Director of UNRRA's Child Search and Repatriation as saying. "When we moved into Germany, the roads were completely congested with cars and people trying to get home."
Despite the fact that in many instances survivors received information that their loved ones had died, many of the papers at the workshop spoke of the survivors' continued hope to find someone alive – even in the present day. Susan Urban, Director of the ShUM Cities (Speyer, Worms and Mainz) on the Rhine-Jewish World Heritage Association, tackled the heartbreaking continued search for missing relatives and friends, borne by survivors until their dying day. Even though over the decades more and more information became available, many survivors never gave up hope of finding more details, more evidence and more closure to their loved ones' stories. In an effort to hold on to their past lives, commemorate those who were lost or even to build a more meaningful future, Urban concluded:
"The search never ended as long as the survivors clung on to the anchor of their past."
The workshop was generously supported by the Gutwirth Family Fund.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 88.
