The Red Cross still helps people learn fate of loved ones lost during the Holocaust
Restoring Family Links, including the Holocaust related cases, has continued to function even during the pandemic. Image by Courtesy of Susan Gati
Read this article in Yiddish
Restoring Family Links, including the Holocaust related cases, has continued to function even during the pandemic. Image by Courtesy of Susan Gati
For over 14 years, I have been a volunteer for an extraordinary service at the Red Cross: helping Holocaust survivors find missing loved ones, after being separated from them all those years ago. This service is part of our Restoring Family Links department, which reunites people separated by war or natural disasters.
Since 1939, the Red Cross has enabled thousands of people to find documentation on their loved ones’ Holocaust experiences, including forced labor, forced evacuation from former Soviet territories and internment in concentration camps. These documents about camp experiences help clients to submit restitution claims. Usually, Restoring Family Links focuses only on reuniting people with missing relatives, but with our Holocaust cases, we also research friends who were lost due to the Holocaust.
Even when our clients receive confirmation that their relatives or friends were deported and killed, or did not survive the war through disease or some other tragedy, they are still grateful to finally learn what happened to them. Confirmation of a loved one’s fate can bring peace. Some of our clients have even found loved ones who are still alive.
Restoring Family Links, including the Holocaust related cases, has continued to function even during the pandemic.
One of the cases that was recently solved concerned a request made by Holocaust survivor Susan Gati. After hearing about our service in 2016, Susan contacted us with her story: When she was four years old, her father, Imre Tandler, left their apartment in Budapest, Hungary, in 1943, to report for forced labor. She would never see him again. She survived the remaining years of the war in hiding, with an aunt, her aunt’s husband, and their two children. Her mother, Antonia, was in hiding at a different location.
After liberation, Susan and her mother found each other. Susan knew that her father had been interned at the Bor work camp in Yugoslavia. Following the war, a friend told Susan and Antonia that he had been taken to Germany, where he spent his last days.
As a child, she had no memories of her father, just a few pictures and some comments that her mother, aunt, and cousins sometimes told her. She always felt his absence. “He was a good person, hard-working,” is all she heard about him.
Throughout her life, Susan kept wondering about her father. In August 2016, thirteen years after her mother passed away, Susan went to a meeting of Café Europa, a social club for survivors, where I presented a program about the Red Cross’s Holocaust tracing services. Susan filled out a form about her father. Alison Berglas, a vital support in our outreach for our Holocaust research, helped Susan trace the information. Half a year after Susan completed her form, we received new details about her father.
Alison and I contacted Susan, and she met with us in person, at our office. We told her that on November 9, 1944, her father was transferred from the Bor work camp to Flossenburg, a concentration camp in northeastern Bavaria, Germany, and on December 3, 1944, he was deported to Hersbruck, a subcamp of Flossenburg, where he passed away on January 4, 1945. “It was sad,” she said, when she looked at the documents. “It was so close to the date of liberation.”
Over the years, our office of the Red Cross in Los Angeles has been reaching out to the community to make sure everyone knows about our Holocaust tracing, and we continue to do so. We have visited places of worship, survivor organizations and Holocaust museums. Survivors and their relatives have been the main audience for our PowerPoint presentation on our service.
We are committed to helping people find more information about their families and relatives, and have a referral list of additional agencies doing Holocaust-related research for people who are not survivors themselves but are children or grandchildren of survivors who want to know what happened to relatives they never met who were lost during the war.
Bob Rich has been active in casework and outreach for the Red Cross’s Holocaust research services for fourteen years and counting. He also worked as a biographer at Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust research institute the Shoah Foundation for several years, as a writer at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust for three years, and as a volunteer for two years at the Survivor Mitzvah Project which is currently providing food, medicine, heat, and shelter to impoverished Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe.
Read this story in Yiddish here.
To learn more about the Red Cross’s Holocaust research services, contact Bob at bob.rich@redcross.org.
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