Small Victory

An email I just received from Yad Vashem:

Dear Ms. Grishman,

Thank you for your letters about the records commemorating Siegfried and Alice Peltesohn of Berlin, Germany.

We are, of course, always pleased to discover that Jews designated as “perished” by our documentation notes actually survived the Holocaust, and we deeply regret any distress caused by our listing your great-grandparents as the Holocaust victims.

Please note that according to the documents existing at Yad Vashem stating that Siegfried Peltesohn and Alice Peltesohn nee Maas are survivors, we will update our database to this effect.

As a result of this change, the records regarding Siegfried and Alice Peltesohn will no longer appear in our online database, which is defined as a database of those who perished.

Please note that as the Internet version of the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names is only updated every few months, it may be some time until you can see the corrections we have made in the online database.

In order to update our records and to have all details of your great-grandparents' Shoah experiences documented at Yad Vashem, we would appreciate your filling out the Shoah Survivors' Registration Forms for them. Blank Form please find attached.

Please fill out a separate Form for each person, sign and date, attach the survivors' photos and mail them unfolded to:

Yad Vashem
Hall of Names
P.O.Box 3477
Attention: Rimma Lerman
Jerusalem 91034
Israel

The names of survivors are removed from the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names and are entered into the Shoah Survivors Database, which is now being compiled, but is not yet online.

Thank you for your assistance in improving our database.

Sincerely,

Rimma Lerman
Hall of Names

After all the sorrow I felt while going through the Shoah Names Database over the last two days, it is so, so amazingly gratifying to be able to remove them from that horrible list.

I'll fill it out tomorrow.

"God must have been on leave during the Holocaust." - Simon Wiesenthal

source

TRIGGER WARNING:

GRAPHIC IMAGES BEHIND JUMP

My Grampa Was A Hunk

My Grampa Is Hotter Than Yours.

I just had to share this, because it's awesome. I think the date on the bottom says '60 which puts him at about 47 in this picture.

Is it just me or does he look like a young Jerry Orbach?

Then again, Gramma was quite the looker herself. This is a photo of her in medical school:

Passing Encounter

Alice Herz-Sommer: pianist and oldest known Holocaust survivor dies aged 110

Tributes have been paid to Alice Herz-Sommer, a renowned concert pianist who was believed to have been the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor, after she died in London at the age of 110.

She was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague at a time when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and endured the city's ghetto following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. She then spent two years in Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp, where nearly 35,000 prisoners perished.

How strange it is to me that, mere hours after writing about my family, I see this as a headline in the news. She was in Theresienstadt, like Alice and Siegfried. I wonder if they ever met...

The Diamond Necklace

(Update: For any would-be thieves, as of ten minutes ago my necklace is safely back in its safety deposit box. Don't even.)

Dear Reader,

When I turned 18 years old, my grandmother gave me a diamond necklace.

Cat fur is the most luxurious background for a necklace.
Unfortunately cats are wont to squirm during the process,
causing the photo to be rather blurry.

The significance of this is not in the type of gift - my family was affluent and gifts like that for momentous occasions were common - but in the history of it and its relation to who I am.

Let Us Begin The Beguine

Dear Reader,

As with any good story, a genealogy needs a beginning, and that beginning is me.

Well, really, it's my high school history teacher assigning a genealogy project that spurred my original interest in the subject. Before then, I'd known that my dad's side of the family had come from Germany before and during the Holocaust, but that knowledge was as abstract as my notion of the enormity of the universe. I still remember clearly, though, the day that my father brought out a hand-drawn family tree that he'd done in grammar school, and for the first time seeing a name with "d. 194?, Auschwitz" written underneath. This wasn't abstract. This was tangible evidence of a particular human being who lived and was murdered and who has an actual connection to me beyond being a tragic photograph in a text book.

Since that project in high school I've collected more information from my father and my Aunt Helen and my... cousin twice removed, I think? Well, my cousin Shlomo. And then I took a good long break from all of that, because I was in college (during which time I was diagnosed with a chronic illness that took away more time and energy than I had to spare) and then out in the Real World doing Important Research. Which is very unfortunate, both because momentum such as I had, once lost, is hard to regain, and because both of my grandparents passed away during that time, depriving me of a wealth of information.

Introductory Dedication

Dear Reader,

My name is Alisa (əliːsə), and this is the story of my father's family.

This blog is hereby dedicated to Stephen Fry.

An odd way, I know, to start a blog dedicated to tracing my family's past, but I have him to thank for what has inspired me to begin these writings.

I was watching the BBC show, Who Do You Think You Are? During the episode featuring Stephen Fry's tracing his mother's family back through the Holocaust, there is a moment where he goes on the Yad Vashem website to find records of relatives who may have been in the concentration camps, and he becomes very emotional because, despite knowing logically that he would find what he did, actually seeing it made it so much more real and poignant and devastating. It reminded me very strongly of how I felt when I was perusing Ancestry.com a couple of years ago and I found copies of the official documents rescinding my grandfather's German citizenship. I knew that it had happened on a purely factual level, but actually seeing the document right there in front of me was like getting kicked in the gut. I've long, long, long adored Stephen Fry for his wit, intelligence, wry humor, and dry sarcasm, but in that moment I felt completely and utterly connected to him on a very emotional level and I wanted to hop a TARDIS and transport myself through time and space to sit there and hug him and tell him I felt that way, too.

After watching Fry's search, I was inspired to go on Yad Vashem's Shoah Names Database. (Shoah, for those unfamiliar with the word, is Hebrew that translates literally into "catastrophe" but is used now almost exclusively to refer to the particular holocaust that people think of as being The Holocaust.) I began looking up my father's paternal grandfather, though ultimately I didn't find very much because the closer members of that side of my family fled Germany before the pogroms began in earnest and so were not in camp records. Then I looked up his maternal grandfather, who has a fascinating history I shall recount in detail over future posts. The Yad Vashem's final record on them was that they'd been sent to the death camps and no more, but I know that they survived through extraordinary measures and wished to update their records. I went on Google to look up their death dates since the records I have on my computer are incomplete... And was blown away by the number of articles there are on my great-grandfather.