The Cutting Edge

Bad Arolsen stack

On Monday, September 8, 2008, a lecture was given at the Rosenthal Institute, at the Graduate Center CUNY in NYC. The topic: “Unlocking the Past: Opening the International Tracing Service Archive.”

The speakers, Arthur S. Berger and Michael Goldman, represented the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Explaining to the audience some background on the ITS (International Tracing Service) archives, they defended the slow pace and the museum’s difficulties in arranging, categorizing, and digitizing millions of documents, many of which are handwritten. In addition to the material from Bad Arolsen, newfound material must be incorporated as well. To date, they have CAMP and GHETTO records (received in 2007), FORCED LABOR FILES (2008), and DP CAMP MATERIALS (expected in 2010). Flyers were distributed. Requests are to be submitted online or mailed to the museum. Survivors were assured that they will be welcomed to visit and assist in the search of their respective materials.

This lecture was met with high hopes by the survivors in the audience. For years, the Red Cross and other services came up with scant information. A real opportunity has opened up to provide a measure of closure.

Unfortunately, the Q & A period was a resounding letdown. Only ONE American copy of these records exists. It is in the hands of the museum, and they are not willing to share. New York and Miami are large centers populated by survivors. Many libraries and colleges/universities with savvy computer experts would love to train historians, give workshops, and find willing volunteers. The museum’s judgment to hold onto this material, and the inflexibility of sharing, is troublesome. The USHMM was created for understanding this terrible period in human history. Technological advances directly benefiting the survivors should and must be utilized as soon as possible.

The question remains, at a time when we are able to “Google” into book and database why is there such a reluctance to make the archival documents available for access on the internet and in local libraries? Is there something to hide?  Limiting access is a matter of control. In whose interest is it to drag out this process? Historians view these documents as interesting artifacts of the Holocaust period. But to the survivors, they are answers.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how a document right before you shedding deep powerful information can do wonders. And yet, we are told by the Holocaust Museum to wait…wait…fill out forms…wait…wait until an uninterested worker, needing frequent breaks from the tedious material, will look up the many different spellings of complicated names. The waiting period of six to eight weeks may or may not yield results, depending on the country which opened its archives. Every one of these documents holds a name, a location, a crime committed against a Jewish person. The perpetrators know it. There are many ‘they’s’ and fewer and fewer of ‘us.’

We survivors deserve—no we DEMAND—to be directly consulted and actively involved, and our children be made part of the process. Our children are the bearers of many of their parents’ scars and are the rightful inheritors of these archives. They must be trained now so that they will be able to continue upon our demise.

Esther Widman is the V.P. Public Relations of the National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, a grass roots Holocaust survivor group.