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.
