04 March 2004
Yad Vashem has located information in its Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names on two Holocaust victims who, according to media reports, were relatives of Sen. John Kerry. Otto Loewe and Jenny Loewe are reported to have been brother and sister of one of Kerry's grandparents.
The source of the information on the Loewe siblings is lists of deportees to the Terezin camp. These lists are kept in Yad Vashem's archives and have been digitized for inclusion in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. According to the data, Otto Loewe was born on February 7, 1875. During the first years of World War II, he resided at Sterngasse 11/16 in Wien. He was deported to Terezin on Transport IV/7 (nr. 321) on August 14, 1942. He died there on June 29, 1943. Jenny Loewe was born on April 21, 1872, and she lived in the same house as her brother. She was deported to Terezin on Transport IV/7 (nr. 319) on the same day Otto was deported. On September 26 of that year, Jenny was deported on Transport BR (nr. 1606) from Terezin to Treblinka. Yad Vashem has no further record of her after that date.
Yad Vashem offers Sen. Kerry the opportunity to fill out Pages of Testimony for Otto Loewe and Jenny Loewe.
About the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names includes nearly 3 million names of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. These names are sourced mainly from over 2 million Pages of Testimony (see below). Many other names are extant in thousands of Holocaust-period lists, community memorial books, and other sources in Yad Vashem’s archives. Yad Vashem is in the midst of a major effort to digitize these names and add them to the Central Database. The Central Database will become accessible to the general public this summer via Yad Vashem’s website.
Pages of Testimony are memorial pages filled out by relatives or other witnesses of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and stored for posterity in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem began collecting Pages of Testimony in 1955, with the goal of memorializing each man, woman, and child who perished in the Shoah.
