A document is not the end of the story

When a family first holds an old document, it is easy to treat it as settled fact. If it says grandfather was born in 1912, it seems there is nothing more to check. If a town appears in it, one may assume the family lived there.

But a historical document is not the end of the story. It is a source of information created by a person, at a particular time and for a particular purpose. To understand what it teaches — and what it cannot teach — we need to read it in context and ask questions about it.

Three questions I ask about every document

1. 1

   Who created it?

   A municipal clerk, a community rabbi, a camp clerk, or a relative who filled in a Page of Testimony many years after the events? Each of them had access to different information, and each acted under different circumstances.

2. 2

   For what purpose was it created?

   A population register, conscription, prisoner registration or a compensation claim — the purpose of the document shapes which details were collected and how they were recorded. In some situations people even gave a different age or other details, for instance in order to avoid conscription or to be considered fit for work.

3. 3

   When was the information recorded, relative to the event?

   A record made close to the birth may rest on information given at the time; a date given decades later may rest on memory. Even a record made at the time may contain errors, so its circumstances matter.

Even a single document has layers

A death certificate illustrates this principle well. The date of death may have been recorded close to the event, while the date of birth and the parents' names may rest on information given by a relative. This does not mean those details are necessarily wrong; it means each detail should be checked on its own, rather than assuming that everything appearing on the same page is equally reliable.

The power of cross-referencing sources

In research on families affected by the Holocaust, it is rare to find a single document that tells the whole story. Instead, the picture is assembled from pieces of information: a prisoner card in the Arolsen archive, a Page of Testimony at Yad Vashem, a resident register in Poland or a list of immigrants to Israel.

Each source was created under different circumstances and sometimes in a different language. When several independent sources support the same detail, confidence in the conclusion grows. When they contradict each other, the contradiction is not necessarily an obstacle — it may be a clue leading to new questions.

A birth year that changes between documents, a name that appears with a different spelling, or a town appearing under its Polish and its German name are not necessarily a sign of a simple error. These are details to be understood in light of the language, the period, the purpose of the record and the circumstances in which each document was created.

In research on my grandfather, Yehuda Portnoy, I encountered such a gap on a seemingly simple question: when did he arrive at Auschwitz. In a letter he wrote himself in 1958 to the authorities in Poland, he stated that he arrived at the beginning of 1943. But the documents told a different story. His screening file in the KGB archive in Vilnius and a certificate from the Arolsen archive both pointed to July 1944. I also checked the number tattooed on his arm and found that it fell within the range of numbers given to a transport that reached Auschwitz in July 1944.

Three independent sources, written by different bodies and in different languages, agreed with one another. I therefore established July 1944 as the supported date. I did not dismiss my grandfather's testimony, but I understood that even a first-hand account is a document that has to be examined. A memory of hard years, written more than a decade after the war, can compress or shift dates.

What is missing may also be meaningful

In historical research, and especially in Holocaust research, the absence of a document may raise questions — but it does not by itself prove what happened. To interpret what is missing, one has to examine which records should have been created, what survived, what is accessible today and what is known about the place and the period.

What this means in my work

In every research project I deliver to a family, I take care to document the sources the conclusions rest on, and to distinguish between information supported by several sources, a detail appearing in a single source, and a hypothesis that still requires checking.

That way the family receives not only answers, but also the path that led to them. The documentation makes it possible to understand what was discovered, how we reached the conclusions and which questions remain open — and it gives the next generations a basis for continuing the research.