Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center.

Holocaust Tracing, Family Searches and Wartime Documentation

The Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center is a national clearinghouse for persons seeking the fates of loved ones missing since the Holocaust and its aftermath. We assist U.S. residents searching for proof of internment, forced/slave labor, or evacuation from former Soviet territories on themselves or family members. This documentation may be required for reparations.

All of our tracing services are free of charge.
We use the worldwide network of more than 180 Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the Magen David Adom in Israel.

We also consult museums, archives, and international organizations to further facilitate tracing requests.

Cases remain open, and if new information becomes available, it is immediately shared with the inquirer.

The Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center is located at:
Street Address:     4800 Mt. Hope Drive - Baltimore, Maryland 21215
Phone:     (410) 624-2090
Fax:     (410) 764-7664
E-mail:     hwvtc@arc-cmc.org

Facts

The American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center is part of a national program for persons seeking the fates of loved ones missing since the end of WWII and the Holocaust and its aftermath. Opened Sept. 24, 1990, the Center assists U.S. residents searching for proof of internment, forced/slave labor, or evacuation from former Soviet territories on themselves or family members. This documentation may be required for reparations.

While the American Red Cross has been providing tracing for victims of WWII and the Nazi regime since 1939, impetus for the creation of the Center occurred in 1989 with the release of files on 400,000 people detained for forced labor or murdered in concentration camps, including those listed in the Auschwitz death books.

• All tracing services at the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center are free of charge.
• To facilitate tracing requests, the American Red Cross taps into the worldwide network of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the Magen David Adom in Israel or their equivalents, and consults museums, archives and international organizations and websites.
• Cases remain open, and if new information becomes available, it is immediately shared with the inquirer.
• Inquiries are initiated through Red Cross chapters. The Center has sought the fate of more than 45,000 individuals missing since the Holocaust and WWII.

Objectives of the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center

Location and family reunification
In a small but significant number of cases, tracing activities reveal that the person being sought has survived. Family members have been reunited with relatives they spent decades searching for.

Persons sought found alive: more than 1500

Closure
In more than 16,000 cases, clients have received confirmation of death or deportation of family members. The deaths of people sent to the extermination camps were not recorded by the Nazis. While tragic for survivors and their families, this allows closure, an important part of the mourning process.

Reparations and pensions
The Red Cross can secure documentation regarding proof of forced labor, slave labor, forced evacuation from former Soviet territories or internment in concentration camps, required for submitting restitution claims.

• International Tracing Service
• Yad Vashem
• U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Jewish Genealogy
• Ancestry.com
• DNA Shoah Project
• The Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Association
• The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference)

April 11 - 18, 2010

From April 11 through April 18, the Museum is leading the nation’s annual Days of Remembrance commemorating the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as well as the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution.

This year marks the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II, and we will pay tribute to the U.S. soldiers who helped defeat Nazi Germany and liberate Holocaust survivors from years of suffering. These stories of freedom remind us that individuals have the power to make a difference. What we do—or choose not to do—matters.

We invite you to join the nation in remembrance:

• Watch the LIVE webcast of the national Days of Remembrance ceremony from the U.S. Capitol Rotunda at 11:30 a.m. EST on April 15, 2010. General David Petraeus will be the featured speaker.
• Add your voice, either at the Museum or online, to our Names Reading Ceremony.
• Share your thoughts on our website or on our Facebook page about how you will remember the Holocaust.

Join us on Twitter for highlights and context about participants and speeches.
Share your questions or thoughts with the Museum by tagging your tweets #DOR2010.

Find out more at www.ushmm.org/remembrance/dor

Why We Remember The Holocaust

Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
Memory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand that’s where our redemption is.

Between 1933 and 1945, the German government, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, carried out the systematic persecution of and murder of Europe’s Jews. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. The Nazi regime also persecuted and killed millions of other people it considered politically, racially, or socially unfit. The Allies’ victory ended World War II, but Nazi Germany and its collaborators had left millions dead and countless lives shattered.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
I think the important thing to understand about this cataclysmic event is that it happened in the heart of Europe. Germany was respected around the world for its leading scientists, its physicians, its theologians. It was a very civilized, advanced country. It was a young democracy, but it was a democracy. And yet it descended not only into social collapse but world war and eventually mass murder.

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
A strong man came to power in Germany whose ideas were that Germany has to create a national community, which would include only the Aryan race, which he considered superior, and all the people who did not belong to the Aryan race could be eliminated. With planning and propaganda, he was able to convince most of the German people to go along with him, insensitive to what happened to the Jews who had basically been their former neighbors. And he managed to build concentration camps and killing centers and finally gas chambers to annihilate six million Jews and at the same time also millions of others, murdered in a systematic, government-sponsored way.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And it’s made up of so many people who participated in different ways, who made it possible.

Rev. Dr. Chris Leighton, Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies:
People who follow orders without question, bystanders who watch and do nothing, ordinary men and women simply going with the flow.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The events and the results of the Holocaust were so devastating. It was an extreme that we can barely imagine.

Rev. Dr. Chris Leighton, Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies:
It’s so mind-boggling that the temptations to forget and to repress, to just put it out of mind, are very real.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
But we remember. We remember because it is an unthinkable scar on humanity. We need to understand what human beings are capable of.

Barack Obama, President of the United States:
We gather today to mourn the loss of so many lives and celebrate those who saved them, honor those who survived, and contemplate the obligations of the living.

Kadian Pow, Museum Educator, Smithsonian Institution:
Days of Remembrance is our nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust—this time that was both a blight on the history of humanity but also a shining moment for the people who were brave enough to put an end to it.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
We are remembering, first and foremost, all the victims, and that is not only the Jewish victims, but there were many non-Jewish victims. Of course, the Jews were the primary target.

Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
The millions of innocent people, including my family and friends, who were killed because they were of the wrong religion, because they had no means of protecting themselves.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
It’s also important to remember the rescuers. These were people who risked not only their own lives, sometimes the lives of their family, to save a fellow human being. And we also remember our American soldiers who were fighting to win World War II and in the course of that, liberated these concentration camps.

Col. Michael Underkofler, U.S. Air Force Reserve:
Those that arrived at the camps in 1945 and were just horrified at what they saw.

Carly Gjolaj, Museum Educator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And that was a huge task for the American soldiers: to help bring humanity back to these people who had been dehumanized for years, to give them medical care.

Lt. Col. Terrance Sanders, U.S. Army:
Looking back allows us to understand how important it is for us to serve in a country where we have the strength and the might and the will to defend those that are defenseless.

Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig, Washington Hebrew Congregation:
So Days of Remembrance is an opportunity for us to remember the suffering that was and the efforts that were made to put an end to such suffering, and it’s a call to conscience today in our world to make sure that we aren’t the silent ones standing by, contributing to the suffering of others.

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
In 1945, at the end of the war, I would have thought that there would never be another Holocaust, that the world was so shocked by what had happened that the world would not permit that. And yet you see what happened in Bosnia, what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Darfur. So there’s still millions of people being persecuted because of their ethnicity.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
It’s really a moral challenge to us to do more in our own lives when we confront injustice or hatred or genocide.

Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Genocide Prevention Educator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Those who suffered and died in the Holocaust, we can honor them today by not being silent. Remembering ties the past and the present together with a powerful, simple thread: “This is not right.”

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
The important thing is that one should not become indifferent to the suffering of others, that one should not stand by and just raise one’s hands and say, “There’s nothing I can do, I’m just a little one person,” because I think what everyone of us does matters.

Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
That’s not enough to curse the darkness of the past. Above all, we have to illuminate the future. And I think that on the Day of Remembrance the most important thing is to remember the humanity that is in all of us to leave the world better for our children and for posterity.

THEME RESOURCES

• 2010 Theme
• Download Theme as a PDF
• 2010 What Can I Do?
• Witnesses to the Holocaust: Liberation 1945 [VIDEO]
• Honoring Liberation [VIDEO]
• Liberation 1945 [PPT, 4 MB]
• Liberators & World War II – Related books in the Museum Shop

PLANNING RESOURCE

• Request a free CD/DVD Days of Remembrance planning resource

PROCLAMATIONS

• 2010 Sample Civic Proclamation (state)
• 2010 Sample Civic Proclamation (city)
• 2010 Sample Civic Proclamation (government department)

• View 2010 Days of Remembrance Proclamations received

POSTERS

• 11” x 17” [PDF format]
  Poster for military bases. Print 100% scale if you have capability to print tabloid-size.
• 8.5” x 11” [PDF format]
  Poster for military bases.
• Liberation 1945 [PDF format]

STICKER

• Download [PDF format]

Tell us about your local Holocaust commemoration. How will you remember?

• Share Your Thoughts

Miep Gies

The British Broadcasting Corporation said Mrs. Gies suffered a fall late last month and died at a nursing home. January 11, 2010

Born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna, Miep Gies was transported to Leiden from Vienna in December 1920 to escape the food shortages prevailing in Austria after World War I. In 1922, she moved with her foster family to Amsterdam. In 1933, she met Otto Frank when she applied for the post of temporary secretary in his spice company, Opekta. She initially ran the Complaints and Information desk in Opekta, and was eventually promoted to a more general administrative role. She became a close friend of the Frank family, as did Jan Gies, whom she married on July 16, 1941 after she refused to join a Nazi women's association and was threatened with deportation back to Austria. Her knowledge of Dutch and German helped the Frank family assimilate into Dutch society, and she and her husband became regular guests at the Franks' home.

In a demonstration film from 1937, Miep Gies shows how to make jam using Opekta. Opekta is produced by Otto Franks company, where Miep works as a secretary. After the war Miep gave Otto Frank the diary of his daughter Anne, when they heard that she had not survived the holocaust.

Hiding the Franks

With her husband, and her colleagues, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, and Bep Voskuijl, Miep Gies helped hide Edith and Otto Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer in a secret upstairs room that was not used in the spice company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht from July 1942 to August 4, 1944.

After the Arrest

In theory, Miep and the other helpers could have been shot if they had been caught hiding Jews. On the morning of August 4, 1944, acting on information provided by an informant, the Grüne Polizei arrested the people hidden at Frank's place of business, as well as Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman. A few days later, Miep unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Austrian Nazi officer to release her friends. Three separate criminal investigations after the war all failed to identify the informant.[citation needed]

Before the hiding place was emptied by the authorities, Miep retrieved Anne Frank's diaries and saved them in her desk drawer for Anne's return. Once the war was over and it was confirmed that Anne had perished in Bergen-Belsen, Gies gave the collection of papers and notebooks to the sole survivor from the Secret Annex, Anne's father, Otto. After transcribing sections for his family, his daughter's literary ability became apparent and he arranged for the book's publication in 1947. Miep did not read the diaries before turning them over to him, and later remarked that if she had she would have had to destroy them because Anne had named all five of the helpers (the Gestapo had identified and arrested two) as well as their black market suppliers. She was, however, eventually persuaded by Otto Frank to read it in its second printing.

Later life and death

In 1994, Miep Gies was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1995, she received the Yad Vashem medal, and in 1997, she was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Miep's and Jan's only child, Paul, was born on July 13, 1950. Jan Gies died in 1993 from diabetes.

In December 1994, during the making of the documentary film Anne Frank Remembered, Miep was introduced to Peter Pfeffer, the son of Fritz Pfeffer. After his parents divorced, Pfeffer was raised by his father, until his father felt it was too dangerous for him to remain in Germany, and in 1938 was sent to London to live with his uncle. By the end of the war he had lost most of his close family, including his father and mother, who had died in Theresienstadt.

Pfeffer moved to the United States and settled in California, where he founded a successful office supply business. Pfeffer, upon meeting Miep Gies, expressed his thanks to her for attempting to save his father's life and Miep asked him if there was anything he wanted to know about his father, expressing that he was a good man and fine dentist. Pfeffer died of cancer two months later. Miep Gies stated in her autobiography, and on her own website:

I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more – much more - during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.

Ever since, Miep Gies has devoted her life to keeping the memory of her beloved friends alive. She has been traveling to dozens of countries and has been giving speeches to numerous schools all over the world.

She is the only person mentioned in The Diary of Anne Frank who is still alive. Every year on August 4, she closes her curtains, ignores the doorbell, the telephone. Every year on August 4, Miep Gies grieves for her lost Jewish friends.

Miep Gies is bewildered that anyone would make a fuss over what she did. In her book Anne Frank Remembered she told: "I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more—much more—during those dark and terrible times years ago ..."

The Nobel Prize recipient, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. He wrote:

"In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care ..."

Miep Gies lived in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland. According to Carol Ann Lee's biography of Otto Frank, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Gies stopped granting interviews after enduring a bout of severe ill health. On February 15, 2009, she celebrated her 100th birthday. (At that time, according to her son, Gies was in good health and followed the news on a daily basis.) Gies died on January 11, 2010, following a short illness. It was reported that this was caused by a fall.

Learn More At The USHMM

VOICES FROM AUSCHWITZ - Liberation of Auschwitz -

“So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn’t function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher. So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived, January 27, I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated. This was my, my survival chance.”—Bart Stern

The train arrived in the middle of the night, so we were greeted by very bright lights shining down on us. We were greeted by soldiers, SS men, as well as women. We were greeted by dogs and whips, by shouting and screaming, orders to try to empty the train, by confusion... There is no way to describe your first coming to Auschwitz. —Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

And they said, “From now on you do not answer by your name. Your name is your number.” And the delusion, the disappointment, the discouragement that I felt, I felt like I was not a human person anymore. —Lilly Appelbaum Lublin Malnik

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts a candle-lighting ceremony attended by the Washington, D.C. diplomatic community, Holocaust survivors, and the general public.

The United States officially commemorates the Holocaust during Days of Remembrance, which is held each April, marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Museum is mandated by the U.S. Congress to lead the nation in commemorating this day.

Visit http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/dor/ for more information and resources.

The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, speaks about the importance of commemorating the Jews who perished during the Holocaust. Rav Lau, himself a child survivor of Buchenwald, powerfully calls upon Jews across the world, to join efforts to recover the names of each individual Shoah victim by filling out Pages of Testimony in their memory and submitting them to Yad Vashem. Search for information or submit names of people you know of who perished during the Shoah on Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.

Containing the world's largest repository of information on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is a leader in Holocaust education, commemoration, research and documentation. Located in Jerusalem, Israel, Yad Vashem's 45 acre campus comprises museums, exhibitions, memorials, sculptures, gardens, and world class research and education centers. Millions each year access Yad Vashem's vast resources in order to study, teach and commemorate the Holocaust.