Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful
detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the
faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports
the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was
still raging and the world still knew little about
gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.
The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly
plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents
held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS,
an arm of the International Committee of the Red
Cross.
This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six
nondescript buildings in a German spa town —
contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in
existence. But because of concerns about the
victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed
to the public for half a century, doling out
information in minimal amounts to survivors or their
descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.
This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling
among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about
to change.
In May, after years of pressure from the United
States and survivors' groups, the 11 countries
overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files
for scholars as well as victims and their families.
In recent weeks the ITS' interim director, Jean-Luc
Blondel, has been to Washington, The Hague and to
the Buchenwald memorial with a new message of
cooperation with other Holocaust institutions and
governments.
ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro, of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to look at
the files and has also given The Associated Press
extensive access on condition no names from the
files are revealed unless they have been identified
in other sources.
"This is powerful stuff," said Shapiro, leafing
through the file containing the Russian's statement
and some 200 other testimonies that take the reader
into the belly of Hitler's death machine — its
camps, inmates, commandants, executioners and
trusted inmates used as low-level guards and known
as kapos.
"If you sat here for a day and read these files,
you'd get a picture of what it was really like in
the camps, how people were treated. Look — names and
names of kapos, guards — the little perpetrators,"
he said.
Moved to this town in central Germany after the
war, the files occupy a former barracks of the
Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party's elite force. They are
stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly
stenciled binders packed into floor-to-ceiling metal
shelves. Their index cards alone fill three large
rooms.
Mandated to trace missing persons and help
families reunite, ITS has allowed few people through
its doors, and has responded to requests for
information on wartime victims with minimal data,
even when its files could have told more.
It may take a year or more for the files to open
fully. Until then, access remains tightly
restricted. "We will be ready any time. We would
open them today, if we had the go-ahead," said
Blondel.
When the archive is finally available,
researchers will have their first chance to see a
unique collection of documents on concentration
camps, slave labor camps and displaced persons. From
toneless lists and heartrending testimony, a skilled
historian may be able to stitch together a new
perspective on the 20th century's darkest years from
the viewpoint of its millions of victims.
"The overall story is pretty well established,
but many details will be filled in," said Yehuda
Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.
"There is a great deal of very interesting
material on a very large number of concentration
camps that we really don't know much about," he
said. "It may contain surprises. We don't know. It
has material that nobody's ever seen."
A visitor to the archive comes into direct
contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder.
In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of
a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in
Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried
among the names is "Frank, Annelise M," her date of
birth (June 12, 1929), Amsterdam address before she
went into hiding (Merwerdeplein 37) and the date she
was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).
Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.
She was on one of the last trains to Germany
before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six
months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death,
one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged
the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, "The Diary of
Anne Frank," written during her 25 months hiding in
a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the
most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.
But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are
known to none but their families.
They are people like Cornelis Marinus
Brouwenstijn, a Dutchman who vanished into the Nazi
gulag at age 22 for illegally possessing a radio. In
a plain manila envelope are his photo, a wallet,
some snapshots, and a naughty typewritten joke about
women in the army.
After the war, his family repeatedly wrote to the
Red Cross asking about him. In 1949, his parents
received a terse form letter saying he died sometime
between April 19 and May 3, 1945, in the area of a
German labor camp. The personal effects, however,
remained in Bad Arolsen, and with the family long
deceased, there is no one left to apply for their
return.
To critics who accuse them of being tightfisted
with their information, the Red Cross and ITS
counter that they have to abide by German privacy
laws and protect the reputations of victims whether
alive or dead. They say the files may contain
unsubstantiated allegations against victims, and
that opening up to researchers would distract ITS
from its main task of providing documentation to
survivors or victims' relatives.
One area of study that will benefit from the ITS
files is the "Lebensborn" program, in which children
deemed to have the "proper genes" were adopted or
even kidnapped to propagate the Aryan master race of
Hitler's dreams.
Another subject is the sheer scope of the
Holocaust system. The files will support new
research from other sources showing that the network
of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was
nearly three times more extensive than previously
thought.
Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000
detention sites. But after the Cold War ended,
records began pouring out of the former communist
nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in
the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people
for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund
financed by the German government and some 3,000
industries.
"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood
of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories,"
said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume
encyclopedia of these detention centers.
The archive has some 3.4 million files of DPs —
Displaced Persons. They include names such as John
Demjanjuk and Viorel Trifa, who immigrated to the
United States and later became internationally known
because their role in the Holocaust came into
question.
Between 1933 to 1945, the Nazi persecution grew
to assembly-line proportions, slaughtering 6 million
Jews and an equal number of Gypsies, homosexuals,
mental patients, political prisoners and other
"undesirables." Tens of millions were conscripted as
forced laborers.
To operate history's greatest slaughter, the
Nazis created a bureaucracy that meticulously
recorded the arrest, movement and death of each
victim. Sometimes even the lice plucked from heads
in concentration camps were counted.
But as the pace of genocide stepped up, unknown
numbers were marched directly from trains to gas
chambers without being registered. In the war's
final months, the bookkeeping collapsed, though the
extermination continued.
What documents survived Nazi attempts to destroy
them were collected by the Allies to help people
find missing relatives. The first documents were
sent in 1946 to Bad Arolsen, and the administration
was handed over to the Red Cross in 1955.
Some 50 million pages — scraps of paper,
transport lists, registration books, labor
documents, medical and death registers — make
reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in
the machinery of persecution, displacement and
death.
Over the years, the International Tracing Service
has answered 11 million requests to locate family
members or provide certificates supporting pension
claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent
rate of success in tracing the requested name.
But the workload has been overwhelming. Two years
ago it had a backlog of nearly half a million
unanswered queries. Director Blondel says the number
was whittled down to 155,000 this summer and will
disappear by the spring of 2008. New queries have
slowed to just 700 a month.
One of ITS' critics is Sabine Stein, archivist at
the Buchenwald concentration camp 150 miles from Bad
Arolsen. She says the archive's refusal to share its
files has caused heartbreak to countless survivors
and their descendants.
For instance, in 1989, Emilia Janikowska asked
ITS to trace her father, Ludwig Kaminski, a coal
miner from Poland who was never heard from again
after his arrest in 1939. It took more than three
years to send her a standard form reporting Kaminski
had died in Buchenwald Dec. 1, 1939.
But there was more she could have been told.
Documents copied by the U.S. Army before they
went to Bad Arolsen, which were seen by AP at
Buchenwald, include mention of Kaminski. They say he
was prisoner No. 8578, that he had arrived in
Buchenwald six weeks earlier with 600 other Poles
and had been placed in Camp 2. The known history of
Buchenwald says Camp 2 was a wooden barracks and
four big tents, jammed with 1,000 Poles and Vienna
Jews. Dozens of inmates died from the cold that
winter. The cause of Kaminski's death was pneumonia.
No one ever told his daughter any of this.
"We had no news from my father since the moment
he was arrested," Janikowska said when contacted at
her home in Krakow, Poland. She now wants more
information for a compensation request.
Archivist Stein says: "Former inmates and their
families want to see some tangible part of their
history; they want to tell their stories," she said.
"What I find most frustrating is that they have all
these documents and they are just sitting on them."
Earlier this month, ITS went some way to make
amends, delivering a full inventory of its records
on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in
searching for 1,000 names Stein had requested.
Compounding the delay in releasing the files is
the cumbrous makeup of the governing committee. Any
decision on their future requires the assent of all
11 member nations — Belgium, Britain, France,
Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Poland and the United States.
Last May's agreement to open the archive
stipulates that it will remain off-limits until
formal ratification by the 11 governments. After
that, each of the 11 countries can have a digital
copy of the files and decide who has access to it.
But some delegations are worried the process will
take too long, at a time when aged survivors are
dying every day.
"What victims of these crimes fear the most is
that when they disappear — and it's happening very
fast now — no one will remember the names of the
families they lost," said Shapiro of the Washington
museum, who was a delegate to the talks.
"It's not a diplomatic timetable, and not an
archivist's timetable, but the actuarial table. If
we don't succeed in having this material public
while there are still survivors, then we failed," he
said.
———
AP correspondents Melissa Eddy in Buchenwald,
Randy Herschaft in Washington D.C., and Monika
Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.
———
On the Net:
International Tracing Service:
www.its-arolsen.org/
U.S. Holocaust Museum:
www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem:
www.yadvashem.org/
