Red Cross Volunteers Solve Historical and Personal Puzzles

Tracing Center volunteers (photo taken during Dr. Healy's visit in December 1999). From left to right: Eva Slonitz, Gerry Gerard, Kristine Belfoure, Arnold Levine (back left), Jean Cauthen,Tom Cauthen (back right) and Bess Kaufman.

Tracking down missing family members separated by the Holocaust in World War II can be somber work indeed, but the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center in Baltimore is a place buzzing with positive energy. Since the center opened in 1990, its staffers and volunteers have found more than 1,000 Holocaust survivors and reunited them with their long-lost families and the energetic tracing staff don't intend to slow down.

Linda Berkowitz, one of the Center's more than 100 volunteers, remembers coming in for her interview five years ago and wondering whether she'd find the work depressing. "It didn't sound like something I wanted to do think about the Holocaust for hours each day," she said. "But I had the wrong idea." She found that the work turned out to be gratifying and even uplifting at times, especially when she was able to locate men and women that had been separated from their families for 50 years or more.

Without the dedication of volunteers like Berkowitz, who retired from her job as an editor several years ago, the Center wouldn't have nearly as many success stories to tell, said Linda Klein, director of the tracing Center.

The Center will search the world over for information leading to the fates of loved ones missing since the Holocaust and World War II. Nearly every inquiry that is processed by the Center is forwarded to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen, Germany which is the largest repository of original Nazi documents in the world. It contains an index of over 17 million names of victims and survivors—both Jewish and non-Jewish—of the Holocaust and World War II. The ITS is administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Before a request is sent to the ITS it is translated into German by a member of the Center's translation team. Many of these volunteers are Holocaust survivors themselves.

While a case is awaiting a response from Germany, volunteers at the Center are using other resources to find answers about the person in question. On Tuesday of last week, Rhoda Steinman, a volunteer since the Center opened a decade ago, was faxing a research request to the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial in Washington, D.C. Within the museum's archives are thousands of books, personal papers and manuscripts, any of which could contain a clue about a missing Holocaust victim.

Steinman and other volunteers — the Center staff calls them "tracing specialists," a title that underscores the importance of their work—become intimately involved with each case once they take it on. Besides corresponding with other organizations like the ITS, the Holocaust Museum and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, volunteers are in continual contact with various Red Cross societies and hundreds of additional archives around the world.

Bess Kaufman has been a tracing specialist since the Center opened its doors in 1990.

"I've written to Iran, Eritrea, China, several South American countries and practically all the European countries in the past ten years," said Bess Kaufman, a sharp and witty 81-year-old who has volunteered since the Center opened its doors in 1990. Generally speaking, she said, the foreign Red Cross and Red Crescent societies are very helpful in researching whatever resources are available in that particular country. And over the last two or three years, Kaufman said, the volunteers have even learned how to use the Internet to search for people.

Even with all of the resources available to the Center volunteers and staff, Kaufman said that a lot of their success in finding victims and survivors has to do with "luck and detective work." Once, she said, she was able to locate a man who had been a jazz musician in New York City after the Holocaust because she knew that the musician's union was a strong one in New York at that time and would have kept extensive records of its members. A lot of educated guesswork also needs to be done in cases where someone's name (or even spelling of their name) has changed, she said.

Honored several times for her outstanding volunteer efforts, Kaufman said that the work she does at the Center is "a very satisfying type of thing." She has attended several reunions between family members that hadn't seen each other for decades, and said that each one is more touching than the next. "I cry at all of them," she said. "It's an emotional experience—we're putting together a family that's been torn apart under such traumatic circumstances. But once you find somebody, you start to get hooked on this."

Each of the volunteers has their own reunion story to tell, and you can tell just by looking at their eyes that the work they do at the Center is extremely meaningful. "Their faces just light up when they start describing their cases," said Klein, who has been the Center's director since 1994. "All of our volunteers take a personal interest in each case they work on."

Even if ending a case means providing an inquirer with a death certificate for the sought relative, she is satisfied, said Kaufman. "Then, the person has closure—they can at least say Kaddish [the prayer that honors the dead] for their mother, father, brother, sister or nephew in synagogue."

Camps and zones of German occupation during WWII. Map courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Many people also look to the tracing Center to provide proof of their own internment during the Holocaust, so that they can apply for a variety of available restitution funds from the German government. Center staff and volunteers have provided more than 1,000 people with documentation of forced labor, slave labor or mandatory evacuation from former Soviet territories.

The volunteers themselves are provided with a sense of accomplishment through their work at the Center as well. "I've learned so much since coming here," said Berkowitz, as she worked on a letter to the German Red Cross. "I know more about the Holocaust, families and even geography. We really are a family here, learning from each other every day."

American Red Cross Holocaust and World War II victims tracing and documentation services are free and confidential and are available by contacting your local American Red Cross chapter or by calling the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center at (410) 764-5311. More information is available at the Center's website .