Bad Arolsen:
If it was not for the Arolsen Archives, the step -sisters Sula Miller and Helen Scallars were never found.
The American Miller and the German scholar recently found that they had only one father – a Holocost Survivor who came to the US.
Miller “approached us because she was looking for information about her father”, Florian Azole, director of Ellassen Archives, said, who is the world’s largest repository about the victims of Nazi regime and the remaining people.
Mendel Muller, a Jewish Born in the Austro-Hungaryian Empire, was conveyed to two Nazi concentration camps: Buchanwald and then Poland were captured in Northern Germany.
An investigation by the archives revealed that he had another daughter Helen, who was still alive and living in Germany.
“Thanks to us, both women came to know each other,” Azole said.
Eighty years after the end of World War II, people from all over the world are still discovering the fate of their family members, who have been sent to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi death camps.
The Vishal Arolsen archives located in the bizarre spa city of Bad Arolesen in Central Germany have millions of documents and objects.
When Miller approached the collection to find out about his father, the researchers stumbled on a 1951 letter from his wife, who was looking for his hideout.
Shortly after the war, Muller married a German woman – her daughter Helen’s mother, born in 1947.
But after some time, he left for America without him and started a new life, married an Austrian woman – who gave birth to Sula in 1960.
Four years after Miller’s initial investigation, Bader Arolsen’s investigator managed to track Helen and the two sisters met for the first time last year.
“His physical equality was striking,” Azole said.
He said that both of them had complex and conflicting views on their father, but “their meeting helped them make peace with the past”, he said.
– Clocks, wallets and rings –
Although 90 percent of the materials organized by the Arolsen collection are now digitized, the complex still stores some 30 million original documents on about 17.5 million people.
There are also thousands of items such as watches, rings and purse collected from old Nazi camps.
The archives were originally established by the Allies in the early 1946 as an international trading service to help people find relatives who disappeared during the war.
It was abducted by most Jews, but with Roma, homosexual dissatisfied and “racially pure” children as part of a program to address the falling birth rate.
Bad Erlesen was chosen as it survived the bombing of the friendly countries and was a working telephone network, and due to its location at the center of the four -occupied areas of Germany (French, American, British and Soviet).
The service was first run by a curious mixture of members of the affiliated forces, surviving the Holocaust from the entire Europe and Germans – including former members of the Nazi party.
But since the 1950s, many remaining people left the country, increasing the number of German employees.
Today, there are about 200 employees in the collection, which provide assistance by some 50 volunteers around the world.
And it is still handling around 20,000 inquiries per year, according to Azoule, often from children or grandchildren of the victims who want to know what happened to them.
Like Abraham Ben, in May 1947, a polish-Jewish parent was born in a camp of displaced individuals in Bamberg, South Germany.
– No grandparents – Dadi –
Now around 80, Ben is still hoping to throw light on the fate of his father’s family, who lagged behind when Warsaw ran away from the Jewish settlement.
“There is a high probability that they died in camps,” he said.
Ben’s father “never talked about (Holocost) … and we never asked him about it. We felt that it was very painful for him.”
Almost someone had no grandparents at the center of Jewish refugees, where Ben was born because the elderly were very weak to work – first to be killed in camps.
“At the age of 10, I realized that other children had grandparents because I went to a German school and my classmates would describe the gifts she gave on Christmas.”
Ben said that he is expecting to find “cousins who have survived” among the five brothers of his father and the children of sisters.
The archives of Bad Arolesen include documents issued by the Nazi party, such as guestopo arrest warrants, people’s list of people to take to camps and camp registers.
Documents are often surprisingly expanded, given the low possibility of existence of people listed in them.
In the Buchanwald, the camp register kept a record of every prisoner’s height, eye and hair color, facial characteristics, marital status, children, religion and in which languages, as well as record of their name, date of birth and exile number.
– ‘The best day of his life’ –
From the beginning, the record was sorted according to a phonetic alphabet, as the same name can be written in different languages in different ways.
Nicole Dominicus, head of the Archive Administration, said, “For example, there are more than 800 ways to write ‘Abrahamovicze’.”
The archives were later expanded to include correspondence between the red crosses and the Nazi administration along with the files compiled by the Allies.
Files also include letters written by people finding their lost relatives.
In a letter written to the International Aurakhan Seva in 1948, a mother, who escaped from Aushwitz, asks her missing daughter, who was separated in the camp.
Volunteers working for the archives outside Germany also help troll through records in other countries.
In Poland, a volunteer Manuella Golak recently met a 93 -year -old woman to hand over a pair of earrings and a watch of her mother, which was deported in 1944 after the Warasaw rebellion.
“He told me that it was the best day of his life,” Golak said, with tears in his eyes.
The 58 -year -old German Achim Warner was “shocked”, when the archives approached him to tell him that his grandfather had a wedding ring, when he arrived at the Dachau concentration camp when he was taken to the camp.
Werner had visited the camp several times, on school tour and as an adult near Munich, without knowing that his grandfather was kept there.
“We knew that he was detained in 1940, but nothing after that,” he said.
Verner does not know why his grandfather was imprisoned, and since the archives have no more information about him, he probably will never.
But he wants to keep the man’s memory alive and has given his daughter a wedding ring.
“She will wear it as a pendant and then pass it to her children,” he said.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)