Yom HaShoah: The mission to uncover the names and fates of a million murdered Jews

The Arolsen Archive.[Missing Credit]

The library has a dedicated team of researchers who search the vast and complex database free of charge for survivors, their relatives and families. Eighty-one years after the war ended, they are busier than ever. Last year the team closed 546 cases: the highest number since gaining access to the archive in 2013.

“The work we do is a tiny act of ethical repair,” says Elise Bath, Wiener’s ITS programme manager.

“The events of the Holocaust, the actions carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators, are atrocious and wicked beyond understanding. They wanted to destroy individuals, not just literally but also to remove the memory of them, to completely annihilate them. If we can work to bring names back, I think that is an inherently ethical undertaking.

“We will never finish the work, but I don’t think that means we should stop trying.”

More information than ever is available to those seeking answers. The Arolsen Archive was opened to public research only in 2007 and over the past 19 years new records are constantly becoming available.

The Arolsen Archives in 1952 (Credit: ITS Photo Collection, Arolsen Archives)[Missing Credit]

Michael Tobias OBE is a professional genealogist and co-founder of Jewish Records Indexing (JRI) Poland, a leading online resource for Jewish genealogists and those tracing histories from the Holocaust. Founded in 1995, the database contains approximately 6.2 million records, including online access to around two million digitised scans. Access is free, with the non-profit initiative supported by user donations.

Tobias, who has conducted research on several episodes of the BBC’s programme Who ​Do You Think You Are?, explains that in 2015 Poland’s privacy law was shortened from 100 to 80 years for many records and it has proved a boon for Jewish genealogists.

“We now actually have access, in most cases, to all surviving deaths and marriages right up to the end of the war,” he says. “We have a massive amount of information available, which takes us right up to the Holocaust.”

Personal effects of Neonella Doboitsch (Credit: Arolsen Archives, Cornelius Gollhardt)[Missing Credit]

Put another way, the technological revolution has changed everything. “I don’t think a lot of people knew at that time just how many records had physically survived and not everything was lost in the war.

“If the internet had been around after the Second World War it would have been fantastic. You would have been able to find each other so much more easily.

“There were things like the old Red Cross [now the Arolsen Archives], where people would write off and maybe many months later might get a reply. It wasn’t automated in any way, it was pure manual slog.”

Besides the likes of Yad Vashem and JRI Poland, family researchers have hoards of information at their fingertips through Jewish Gen and commercial platforms such as MyHeritage, which regularly adds new collections.

Based in Israel, MyHeritage is always seeking to innovate, the most recent example being Scribe AI, which allows users to make sense of illegible handwriting and translates foreign files to a very high standard.

The synagogue Maciejow, now Lukiv, Ukraine. (Arolson Archive)[Missing Credit]

Technology is also essential to Yad Vashem, which is developing AI tools to analyse hundreds of millions of documents previously too extensive to research manually. They estimate this could potentially enable them to recover a further 250,000 names.

“Each digitised document, transcribed survivor testimony, or easily searchable database opens up possibilities for professional and amateur genealogists. Each time one archive cooperates with another archive, it creates opportunities to discover traces of relatives who were quite literally invisible only a few years ago,” says Dr Yoel Finkelman, Yad Vashem’s interim director of archives and chief archivist. “These new stories, new family connections, and new names make people’s connections to their past richer and closer.”

Perhaps the biggest game-changer is DNA testing. Now reasonably priced, it can prove critical for eroding brick walls. Several initiatives offer free DNA tests and sometimes analysis to survivors and immediate descendants, including the Holocaust Reunion Project and the Center for Jewish History.

Survivors in nearby Kovel survey a death pit. (Arolsen Archive)[Missing Credit]

Tobias also works with families impacted by the Holocaust, on a mostly pro-bono basis. “A lot of survivors have had so many questions for decades and there wasn’t the opportunity to get answers. But since DNA testing came along, you can get them,” he says. “You may find someone who’s been doing this work for 20 years and their branch of the family may have survived. They may have information about your family.”

That so many of those brutally murdered can be commemorated is partly down to the Nazis’ meticulous records. However, in the earlier stage of the war, when the Germans dispatched mobile killing squads into the Soviet Union from 1941, this was much less the case. Assisted by local collaborators, the Einsatzgruppen would roll into town, round Jews up and shoot them into pits.

“As a general rule, the further east you go, the less information there’ll be about a person,” said Bath. “You have whole communities in eastern Europe that were just wiped out with no one left to even remember their names, much less contact the ITS afterwards to ask for information.”

While finding out their definitive fate may prove impossible, the team at the library can help relatives discover what took place in broad-brush terms. Whatever they uncover is shared sensitively.

​“We understand that the information we are working with has the potential to be deeply traumatic for the people who are finding out this information, often for the first time,” says Bath.

“People are braced to a degree to receive this sort of level of information but the information in the archive can be so stark and distressing and can also contain details such as collaboration and child abandonment that people aren’t necessarily anticipating,” she says.

“Sharing all the information we find is part of our duty but we make sure that we do this in as sensitive and ethical a manner as possible.”

Registration document. (Photo: Arolsen Archives / Stadtarchiv Neustadt in Holstein)[Missing Credit]

Preparing clients for tough reading is something with which William Hastings Burke, an Australian historian living in Poland, is familiar. The author of Thirty Four: The Key to Goring’s last Secret employs his expert research skills to solve genealogical riddles, working for both private clients and ancestry companies like MyHeritage.

“I always ask clients, ‘Do you want to know all the details?’ And, surprisingly maybe, most people do want to know as much as they can. Perhaps now that more than eight decades have passed, they want to learn as many facts as possible about those horrific events,” he says.

His collaborations with MyHeritage have included helping a woman born in Bergen-Belsen to find her biological father and a separate project to repatriate possessions of concentration camp victims to their families in the Netherlands.

Although not Jewish – even though a DNA test revealed 12 per cent Ashkenazi ancestry on his father’s side – Burke is an expert in researching Jewish history in Poland where “between 60 and 70 per cent of my work is Jewish-focused”. While some people simply want answers, others are seeking evidence for citizenship and/or reparation claims.

“The Second World War and the Shoah were a sort of wrecking ball through countries, communities and families,” says Burke, who is fluent in German and Polish.

“People responded in different ways. If they survived the Holocaust, there was mass immigration. One of the most challenging aspects of my research is that the people in displaced person camps in Germany reinvented themselves. They changed their names and emigrated to a country as far away from Europe as they could.”

Arolsen Archive.[Missing Credit]

To this end, he has a tip for would-be researchers in this area: “I always say start with the obituary and work backwards from say the American records, and then the immigration and DP camps – that’s when you see the changeover of names.”

Although a lot of material is available online, consulting an expert can turbo-charge investigations. Burke always carries out “exploratory research” for prospective clients to create “clear expectations”.

“Obviously you’ve got to know how to look,” says Burke. “It takes an expert to do all that. A lot of these records are in multiple languages and scripts – Russian Cyrillic, German and Polish – and are hidden. They’re not indexed on Google or anything like that. It takes a skilful eye, it takes a linguist, it takes a detective, but you can break through.”

After decades of searching, I finally have the names of family members so I can light a candle for them

When my Polish grandfather Yosef Kolirin died in Israeli in 1980, he took his past with him. What his five children knew of his life before them would probably not have filled the back of an envelope.

They knew he arrived without his family at some point in the 1920s. They knew the name of the village where he grew up – Maciejow in then Poland, Lukiv in today’s Ukraine – and the name of their grandparents, after whom two of them were named.In common with many whose family lives were destroyed by the Holocaust, my grandfather rarely spoke about the Old Country. My late father and his four siblings did not know when their father was born, who he had left behind and what fate had befallen them. Family were killed by the Nazis, but who, when, where or how remained a mystery.

My aunt has spent decades trying to uncover the fate of her father’s family. The journey has been a long and frustrating one, as she has come up against brick wall after brick wall. I have long been interested in genealogy and building my family tree but had become resigned to the fact that some questions have no answers. But emotionally I struggled: we are none of us rootless.

Yosef as a young man in Tel Aviv.[Missing Credit]

And then, recently, things started to shift. Thanks to London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC and Yahad-iIn Unum, a French organisation set up to locate the sites of mass graves of Jews murdered by the Nazis’ mobile killing units and gather testimony from the witnesses of the so-called Holocaust by Bullets, I have managed to build a picture of what happened to the Jewish community in Maciejow.

And what a horrifying picture it is.

Three days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany’s invasion of Russian territory in June 1941, Hitler’s forces marched into Maciejow. The first mass shooting, or Aktion, came less than a month later and led to the deaths of hundreds of men. Equally abominable episodes took place in the year or so that followed and, according to the USHMM’s estimates, up to 2,500 people were murdered in Maciejow.

Not having names for any of my grandfather’s relatives has made searching for death records all but impossible. There are testimonies for several people with surnames close to my own at Yad Vashem, but I was not able to connect them to my family.

Yosef and Lianne.[Missing Credit]

But now, 81 years after the end of the war, there’s been a breakthrough at the hands of the remarkable genealogist Michael Tobias and William Hastings Burke, a Polish-based author and historian-turned-genealogical detective.

Thanks to Tobias, I can now trace my grandfather’s line back to 1858 in Poland, and both he and Burke were able to uncover birth records for my grandfather, as well as two of his brothers, and plenty of other details besides.

Most significantly for me, as we approach Yom Hashoah, is that both experts identified testimonies at Yad Vashem written in Cyrillic. My great uncle, his wife and their three children, one of whom was just three years old and had the exact same name as my late father, were murdered by the Nazis in Kovel, in Ukraine.

We have no death certificates, no photos and know precious little about them, but at least we now know for whom to light a candle. May their memories be a blessing.