"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the
annihilation of the Jews" Adolf Hitler
"During the Holocaust, they took the names away of the people, each with their own soul, and they put numbers on their arms. The job of a Jewish Genealogist, is to replace those numbers and give them back their names." Arthur Kurzweil - Jewish Genealogist
"If the deportation took place from what had been German territory in
1938, there is a Memorial Book for those. There are also also Memorial
Books for Theresienstadt deportees from what is now Austria and another
one for deportees from what was Czechoslovakia. These volumes provide
information about transport number, date of arrival in Theresienstadt,
death in Theresienstadt, transport number and date of deportation to
another destination or liberation in Theresienstadt." Posted by Charles Vitez on JewishGen 4-30-03
"During the Holocaust, they took the names away of the people, each with their own soul, and they put numbers on their arms. The job of a Jewish Genealogist, is to replace those numbers and give them back their names." Arthur Kurzweil
Books
Most books, CDs, etc. can be ordered through my link to Amazon.com by clicking here > Jewish Genealogy
18 Books written by Survivors - eighteen uniquely written stories, published by their authors dealing with the Holocaust and including photos and a Virtual Tour of Auschwitz http://remember.org/bksrvr.html
"36 Stories of Memory and Hope from the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust"- published by Bullfinch Press - 174 pages
"120 HIAS Stories" - edited by Kathleen Andersen, Morris Ardoin and Mararita Zilberman - published by HIAS - 289 pages. The book is divided into 3 sections: 1881-1930, beginning with the pogroms in Russia; 1931-1950, Holocaust rescue work; 1951-2001 from post-WW II displaced persons camps, Russia and Egypt.
"AKTION KINDER DES HOLOCAUST" (AKdH) all in German, but if you can read German, there is a treasure of information at this site www.akdh.ch
"An Echo in My Blood: The search for a Family's Hidden Past" - authored by Mark Wyman
Buy
from Amazon.com
"A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors" - authored Michael Berenbaum and published by Bulfinch. Based on the chronology of the Holocaust, the author includes chapters on life in Theresienstadt, the Einsatzgruppen, the Warsaw ghetto Uprising, the fate of the gypsies, rescue in Denmark and Bulgaria, the murder of Hungarian Jews and the death marches.
"Atlas of the Holocaust" - authored by Martin Gilbert
"Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest" - explores, among other subjects, the life and massacre of the author's grandmother's village of Volchin (35 kilometers northwest of Brest) - authored by Andrea Simon SimonAndrea@msn.com
"Berga: Soldiers of Another War" - the Charles Guggenheim document of the little known story of the 350 POWs identified as Jews (although fewer than a third were) who spent December 1944 to April 1945 as slave laborers for the Nazis. www.pbs.org/berga
"Death Books From Auschwitz" - a three volume set, two of which are lists of individuals killed in the Holocaust. There are thousands of names listed in alphabetical order. The information includes: name, date of birth, date of death, place of birth inmate number. The lists are contained in volumes two and three. Volume one contains many photographs of victims as well as many reports and photographs of various lists. These lists are by no means complete, but there are many names contained. Catalog number is *PXV 95-3344 and the books are located at the New York Public Library, in the Jewish Division on the first floor. The Jewish Division is closed on Mondays.
"The Doll Maker" - authored by Marilyn S. Land - the story of Adler Doll Works and how faced with declining business, how the Adlers risk everything to secure the safety and freedom of friends and strangers who seek their help.
"DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951" - authored Mark Wyman
Buy
from Amazon.com
"Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before The Holocaust" - This majestic three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides vital information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve
of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Except in very rare cases (as with Copenhagen), the survival statistics are horrifying.
But the encyclopedia offers more than statistics: the numbers come to life through more than 600 black-and-white photographs, most of which are from the archives of Israel's Yad Vashem museum. Here we see the vibrancy of Jewish life before the war kolkhoz theater groups and swing bands, weddings and riotous Purim parties, shops and synagogues. Several of the photographs depict Jewish military units from WWI; others show Jewish young people looking bored in chemistry class or diligently trying to master the violin during orchestra practice. A final 56-page section entitled "In Memoriam" provides unforgettable, haunting photographs of the Holocaust itself. This three-volume set is a required acquisition for libraries and anyone interested in Jewish studies. Published by the
New York University Press and available through Amazon.com
"Eternal Treblinka" - authored by Charles Patterson and published by Lantern Books
"Every Day Remembrance Day" - authored by Simon Wiesenthal
"For Them, Life in America Began in 1944, Behind a Fence". It is about a group of about 1,000 Jews brought to the US from Italy in 1944 and kept in an internment camp in upstate New York for seven months after the war was over until President Truman allowed them to apply for citizenship. The article mentions the emotions of the US official charged with choosing who would be allowed to travel on the ship. I believe a free registration is required to view articles on the NY Times web site New York Times
http://tinyurl.com/hmcm
From a posting to JewishGen by Andrew Blumberg on 7/21/03
"From Oswiecim to Auschwitz: Poland Revisited" - authored by Moshe Weiss and published in 1994 by Mosiac Press, Buffalo, NY. ISBN 0-88962-558-1 and ISBN 0-88962-557-3 in paperback form.
"Gedenkbuch: Haeftlinge des Konzentrationslagfers Bergen-Belsen" published by Niedersaechsische Landeszentrale fuer Politische Bildung -- Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen' in 1995 and has 652 pages. The book lists 25,000 inmates at the death camp Bergen-Belsen. "Gedenkbuch of German Jewish Holocaust Victims" - is not comprehensive as many names are left out.
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" - authored by Daniel Goldhagen describes the death marches and a number of satellite camps.
"Holocaust: A History" - co-authored by Deborah Dwork
"Holocaust An End to Innocence" - authored by Rabbi Seymour Rossel http://www.rossel.net/
"The Holocaust Chronicle" - a remembrance designed to be held in one's hands. This is a very heavy volume, but well worth the cost as it includes over 2,000 photographs, a 3,000 item timeline and 250 sidebars detailing the significant people, places, issues and events. Written and fact-checked by top scholars. 768 pages. Published by Publications International, Ltd., Lincolnwood, IL 60712
"Holocaust Memoir Digest: Survivors' Published Memoirs With Study Guide and Maps - compiled and edited by Esther Goldberg and published by Vallentine Mitchell Publishers.
ISBN 0-85303-528-8
"Holocaust: The Events and Their Impact on Real People" - authored by Angela Gluck Wood and Dan Stone and published by DK Publishing
"How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust" - authored by Gary Mokotoff.
Buy
from Amazon.com
"How to Trace Your Jewish Roots: Discovering Your Unique History" - authored by Rabbie Jo David
Buy
from Amazon.com
"Kristallnacht: Prelude To Disaster" - authored by Sir Martin Gilbert. An account of the attacks on Jews and Jewish property and the destruction of more than a thousand synagogues in Germany and Austria on November 9/10/, 1938. Incorporates 55 eyewitness accounts sent to the author.
"TheLast Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak" - In 1991, a group of child survivors in Poland, got together and formed the association of the children of the Holocaust in Poland. In the course of joining the organization, each person wrote short autobiographies containing their experiences during the war. One of the authors, a professional editor, gathered sixty some of these stories together into a book that the association published in 1993 which was later translated into English and published by Northwestern University Press in 1999.
"TheLast Sunrise" - authored by Harold Gordon (Hirshel Grodzienski) and published by H & J Publishing in 1992. A true story about a ten year old boy who survived the Holocaust, five years in Nazi Concentration Camps and with a positive attitude toward the future. ISBN: 0963258915
"Lebenszeichen aus Piaski; Briefe Deportierter aus dem Distrikt Lublin, 1940-1943" - authored by Else Rosenfeld and Gertrud Luckner, Biederstein Verlag Muenchen, 1968 The book deals mainly with Jews who were deported from Stettin, with one chapter dealing with Viennese Jews. Further information may be available from Werner Cohn: wernerco@worldnet.att.net
"Liste Officielle ... des Decedes des Camps de Concentration" published by Paris, France, Republique Francaise, Ministere des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre, 1945/1949. There are 6 volumes and deal with the following concentration camps: Mauthausen; Neuengamme; Auschwitz; Majdanek; Bergen-Belsen; Sachsenhausen; Struthof; Ellrich; Flossenburg and Dachau. The book is only available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Library in Washington, D.C. and was reproduced by YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1997.
You have to be very careful with the lists of deportees from France published in the pages of testimonies which contain some errors. On the site you were telling about, for example on the first page, line 14 : Lionel ALMULY, born 3/05/1908 in France was not deported to Auschwitz but to the Baltic States, either in Kaunas (Lithuania) or Reval (Estonia). When the page of testimony was sent by his family, this one had received wrong information, as it's the case for most of the deportees of the convoy #73 which left France on 15 May 1944. All of them were sent to the Baltic States. Except 22 survivors in 1945, and except for about 100 of them (out of 878) for whom we have the right information, nobody knows which ones died in Lithuania (Kaunas)
or in Estonia (Reval, which is Tallinn today). From a posting by Eve Line Blum-Cherchevsky Besancon (France) and also Cercle de Genealogie Juive (International JGS in Paris) http://www.genealoj.org
"Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" - authored by Richard Rhodes and published by Knopf Publishing
"Mischa Defonseca: Memoirs of the Holocaust" - authored by Misha Defonseca. Describes her life of hiding from the Nazis and living with wolves as a child until rescued after WW II.
"My Holocaust: A Novel" - authored by Tova Reich and published by HarperCollins
"My Name Was No. 133909 ... And I Sang" - authored by Murray Brandys.
Once in the site, click on "Histories and Narratives." It is listed under the title. www.chgs.umn.edu
"Nazi Crimes On Trial" - German Trials concerning Nazi Capital Crimes 1945 - 1999, compiled at the institute of Criminal Law of the university of Amsterdam by Prof. D. C.F. Ruter and Dr. D. W. de Mildt. This website presents a systematic survey (for now only in German, but some of the site is in English) of the more than 900 Nazi trial cases conducted in West Germany since 1945 and the 97 Nazi trial cases conducted in East Germany during the years 1956 - 1990, including the so called Rehabilitation trials. Very interesting http://www.jur.uva.nl/junsv/
"Our Tomorrows Never Came" - authored by Etunia Bauer Katz who now lives in Queens, NY. The book is about her and her family's efforts at surviving WW II as Jews living in Poland. Her family managed to escape deportation to the concentration camps.
"The Pianist: The Extra-ordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945" - authored by Wladyslaw Szpilman and published in paperback by Picador.
"Register of Jewish Holocaust Survivors" - authored by Benjamin and Vladka Meed and published in 1966 by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The 4 volume register lists American and Canadian survivors in alphabetical order as well as by place of birth and town before thee war and location during the Holocaust. Vol. 1 lists the people by name and Vol. 2 lists them by their hometown. The 2 volume set can be obtained through Inter-library loan. The Neve Shalom Synagogue in Portland Oregon owns the 4 volume set. www.nevehshalom.org
"Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust" - authored by Nechama Tec and published by Yale University Press. The author contributes to our understanding of how Jewish men and women responded to the dire circumstances in Nazi occupied Europe.
"TheRighteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust" - authored by Martin Gilbert and Henry Holt. The story of the heroic deeds of righteous gentiles, who, at considerable risk to themselves, saved Jews during the Holocaust.
"Sources of Holocaust Research" - authored by Raul Hilberg 212 pages $26.00. this is a primer for developing historical sources and getting a true picture. Very interesting, this book can be ordered via the link from the link to Amazon.com on the left bar on this page.
"Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary" authored by Avraham Tory
"Tell The World" - authored by Shaindy Perl - the true story of Esther Terner-Raab who took part in the Sobibor death camp revolt on October 14, 1943.
"Tormersdorf, Gruessau, Riebnig" -many elderly Jews were deported from Breslau and other places in Niederschlesien. This book is available with approximately 1,800 names: (Obozy Przejsciowe dla Zydow Dolnego Slaska z lat 1941-1943" authored by Alfred Koniczny and published by Wydawnictowo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego in 1997 in soft back ISBN 83-229-1713-9
Written mostly in Polish with a brief German summary and divided into 3 parts:
1. 85 pages in Polish about the camps, containing names and a few black and white photos.
2. Lists of 1,800 people in the three camps including birth dates and places, maiden names and, in a few cases, death dates and residence addresses in Breslau.
3. Selected copies of correspondence between individuals and authorities regarding money matters (In German)
"The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories" edited by Joshua Rubenstein, Yitzhak Arad and Ilya Altman
"When Light Pierced the Darkness" - authored by Nehama Tec. One of the first books to document, especially in Poland, the phenomenon of the righteous gentiles.
"Where We Once Walked: A Guide to the Jewish communities Destroyed in the Holocaust" - co-authored by Sallyann Amdur Sack, PhD and Gary Mokotoff.
"Witness to the Holocaust" - edited by Michael Berenbaum and published by HarperCollins in 1997
General
Holocaust Information
An excellent site to find information about most European countries is at
http://searcheurope.com
and type in the name of the country you wish to research in the search field. This site is a great source to find information for almost every European country.
Among the 18,000 Righteous Gentiles officially recognized by Yad Vashem, 4,000 are Dutch, by far the largest national contingent in Europe
Anne Frank - Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, 9786 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035-4792 has the original of a poem "Forget me Not" written by Anne to her friend Henny two years before going into hiding with her family. The Museum's web site is www.wiesenthal.com
The second floor of the Museum is devoted to a state-of-the-art Multimedia Learning Center, which houses a vast wealth of information on the Holocaust, WW II and anti-Semitism. These databanks include over 50,000 photos and maps, 6,000 encyclopedic entries and 14 hours of historical film footage and video testimonies.
Another extraordinary exhibit featuring one of history's favorite teenagers is located at http://www.annefrank.com
Aufbau Newspaper Database - this German-language newspaper that was published in New York from September, 1944 through September 27, 1946, printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe. There are 33,357 names that have been computerized. It can also be found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/aufbau.htm
Austrian, Czech, and German Jews in Riga: Data on 876 forced Jewish laborers in Riga, Latvia. Holocaust
Austrian Holocaust Asset Archives - from this page you are offered links to pages with lists of names for whom records exist. You send an initial letter to the archives in Vienna (in English) indicating your interest in the name and date of birth. They will reply in due course asking for a money order for 59 Austrian Shillings ($5.00) for the report. You then send the money order and the form to Vienna. Plan on it taking at least 3 or more months. The records contain only the name of the person's spouses name that can be considered of genealogical value.
Deportation from Vienna - a web site containing the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance (DOW) and located in Vienna can provide a nearly 30 page paper entitled "Expulsion and Extermination: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945" This paper was prepared by Florian Freund and Hans Safrian and translated to English by Dalia Rosenfeld and Gabriel Biemann http://www.doew.at The web site is in German and in English
Breslau Deportations: Three transports of 1,845 persons sent to Silesian towns in 1941-1942. Holocaust
Bukovina (Bucovina) (Region), Romania/Ukraine - Handbook prepared under the direction of the Historical Section of the British Foreign Office - 1919 - Geschichte Der Juden in Der Bukowina (History of the Jews in the Bukovina) http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/translations.html
Concentration Camps: A factual report on crimes committed against Humanity contains medical experiments and other horrors which occurred in Nazi concentration camps during WW II http://zero.tolerance.org/zt/kz.html
Concentration Camp Addresses -The camps are classified by countries, based on the 1939-1945 borders. When known, the name of each sub-camp or external kommando is followed by the name of the company which used inmates as slave. http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html
Correspondence from the various Nazi labor camps including the Schindler factory in Krakow is stored at The Jewish Historical Association ul. Tlomackie 3/5, 00-090 Warsaw, Poland Telephone/Fax (48-2) 625 0400; Email reisner@plearn.edu.pl
Auschwitz (Oswiecim) - located west of Krakow, Poland, and is famous for the concentration camp that is now a museum chronicling the horrors of the Nazis' final solution. Before WW II, Oswiecim was a bustling town of 12,000 people, more than half of them Jews. Most of the local Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and only one of the town's synagogues survived.
There were approximately 40 more satellite camps established around Auschwitz. These were forced labor camps and were known collectively as Auschwitz III. A visit to: Auschwitz, Birkenau, Kazimierz, Lublin, Majdanek, Plaszow, Treblinka, Tykocin, Warsaw http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/
Also more information available at
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x07/xm0712.html
Auschwitz Jewish Center located in Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz)
The website (in English ) www.ajcf.org
E-mail address in Poland is info@ajcf.pl
Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation - located at
36 West 44th Street,
Suite 310,
New York, NY 10036.
Telephone 212 575 1050
http://www.ajcf.org
or e-mail info@ajcf.org
A film about what is believed to be the only organized uprising ever attempted by the prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau is soon to be released. It is entitled "The Grey Zone" and tells the story of the October 7, 1944 uprising by the Sonderkommandos, Jews who were forced to assist in the extermination of their fellow prisoners in the gas chambers. The prisoners managed to blow up one of the four crematoria, but the SS quelled the riot and hundreds of Jews involved were executed.
Auschwitz Laborers: Documents on 5,310 forced laborers who entered Auschwitz, including parents' names and maiden names. Holocaust
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, "Death Books from Auschwitz" published in 1995
Czech, "Auschwitz Chronicle", published in 1990
Drancy - a Paris suburb where a memorial to the tens of thousands of French Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz stands today in their memory. There were a number of convoys (around 50) that departed for Auschwitz in 1943 including Convoy No. 62 consisting of 1,199 Jews.
Jane Haining, Saint from Auschwitz - she protected 400 children during the Holocaust and she died in Auschwitz for her beliefs http://www.auschwitz.dk/Haining.htm
Searchable Database in English - the total number of records in the database remains at 69,000 and the search will still display no more than 40 names at a time even if there is indication that many more are in the database. In the FAQ there is an explanation of the use of 'wildcard' entries. http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/html/eng/start/index.php
The Yad Vashem web site contains information about Auschwitz including photos and a map at http://yadvashem.org/
click on 'On-Line Exhibitions'
Jacob Rosen offered the following (edited) information in a posting to JewishGen on 8/11/03:
Auschwitz Archive Online - "The site contains only 69,000 names so the chances to find a relative are relatively slim. However I was lucky to find Hermann Koenigsbuch only after I typed Konigsbuch (without umlaut or e). I also found the brother of my father in law (Josef Apotheker). For unknown reason the the search program responds only to the German version of the place of birth or residence. So if you type Krakow nothing will come out. But if you type Krakau then it will respond. Only if there is no German name to the place the local name such as Bardejov or Brzesko or Niepolomice can be used. All in all type just the surname and your chances are better."
"The translation of: Blad palaczenia z baza danych is: error in contacting the database."
"The translation of : prosimy spruwowac ponowie za chwile is: please try again in a moment."
A second posting on 8-12-03 offered the following:
"It gives the Polish/Yiddish/German/Czech, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian
names places about which Yizkor books were published."
"The case of Tsans or Nowy Sac is fascinating."
"I would also recommend, in view of the limited list of names on line, in case that the spelling of the surname is not clear, to type just the name of birth (urodzenia) or residence (mieszkania). This may yield more results, if at all."
"About other technical problems in case of too much data-I still have to study it. Hopefully, younger and more technical Genners will learn it quicker and share it with us all."
In July, 2004, where the site of the destroyed Great synagogue was, a treasure trove of Judaica was discovered. The object had been buried since the Holocaust and included three bronze candelabras, a bronze menorah, 10 chandeliers and a ner tamid (eternal lamp) that once hung before the synagogue ark. Tomasz Kuncewicz is the director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, a prayer and study complex near the site of the notorious death camp.
Belzec, Poland - one of three euthanasia sites built after the Wannsee Conference of June 20,1942. A Reassessment: Resettlement Transports to Belzec, March-December 1942 http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/translations.html
This camp is located in the Lublin area and was the location of the killing of over half a million Jews. It had gas chambers that held 1,200 people, according to the U.S. Holocaust memorial Commission, and 600,000 died there. The Nazis eradicated all traces of their crimes here.
Bergen-Belsen - lists of Czechoslovak inmates at this and Theresienstadt camps http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/bergen-belsen/
Another source is the book 'Gedenkbuch: Haeftlinge des Konzentrationslagfers Bergen-Belsen" published by Niedersaechsische Landeszentrale fuer Politische Bildung -- Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen' in 1995 and has 652 pages. The book lists 25,000 inmates at the death camp Bergen-Belsen.
The Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield, Michigan has a copy of a rare book "Gedenkbuch) Haeftlinge des Konzentrationslagfers Bergen-Belsen" published by Niedersaechsische Landeszentrale fuer Politische Bildung - Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen in 1995. 652 pages
"Holocaust and Rebirth: Bergen-Belsen 1945-1965" - published by Bergen-Belsen Memorial Press
"Irgun Sheerit Hapleita Me-Haezor Habriti' - a memorial book about this camp
Buchenwald Concentration Camp CD. There appears to be a CD available from the Buchenwald Memorial Historical Department. On the cover is shown an object of a cover of an urn from the local crematorium in Weimar. Ashes from those cremated at Buchenwald stayed in the administration of the camp. In time, they were poured out. Upon the arrival of the US Army, thousands of urns or covers were found. http://www.ushmm.org/
Czestochowa - reference is made of this camp in the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners". Czestochowa Forced Laborers: 4,610 prisoners at the Hasag Pulcery labor camp in Czestochowa. Holocaust