Reconstructing a route through the camps

In many families, a grandparent's Holocaust story is reduced to one sentence: "he was in the camps." Sometimes the name of one camp is known as well, sometimes the prisoner number on the arm was preserved, and sometimes only partial memories remain.

But behind that short sentence there sometimes hides a whole route: places of imprisonment, labour camps, transfers between countries, and stations the family never knew about.

How can such a route be reconstructed, decades after the events, when all that remains is a few documents and fragments of memory?

I learned the answer to that question first of all through the research on my grandfather, Yehuda (Yudka) Portnoy.

It all began with one document

In 2022 my cousin mentioned in passing some materials he had received from Yad Vashem and passed them on to me. Until then we knew that grandfather had been in Auschwitz, among other things because of the prisoner number on his arm. But we did not know when he was there, how long he spent in the camps, where he was transferred to, or how he survived.

There were family stories as well. The story I remember especially was that grandfather escaped and survived with the partisans in the forests. During the research it turned out that this story does not match the route I was able to reconstruct.

One of the first documents to open a new direction for me was a card in the war victims' records of the Polish Red Cross. It contained two details that became the starting point for what followed: prisoner number 123190 and the date of entry to Mauthausen-Gusen, 28 January 1945.

Suddenly I no longer had only a family memory and the name of a camp. I had a detail that could be checked, compared and followed up.

From a prisoner number to a route

The number and the date allowed me to approach the archive of the Mauthausen memorial site and check whether further records about grandfather existed. Another card led me to Flossenbürg and to the subcamp Groditz.

Within a short time, from the feeling that we knew almost nothing about the route he had taken, three places of imprisonment we had not previously known came to light.

This is often how the reconstruction of a Holocaust-era route begins: not from one document that tells the whole story, but from a small detail that leads to another document, which points to another place and raises new questions.

How do you connect the pieces of the puzzle?

1. 1

   Start with what the family already knows

   The starting point is always the home. You ask siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins what they remember and what they heard. You check which documents, photographs and letters were kept in drawers. Sometimes a small detail — the name of a town, a family nickname or a number on an arm — turns out later to be an important thread.

   The aim at this stage is not to find all the answers, but to gather everything that already exists and document it, including what rests on memory alone.

2. 2

   Establish the basic details in databases in Israel

   Before approaching archives abroad, I establish the basic details: full name and possible spellings of it, parents' names, date and place of birth, country of origin and the date of immigration to Israel.

   These details can be found in databases in Israel: Interior Ministry records, the Central Zionist Archives, immigration documents and local records.

   A key resource at this stage is Yad Vashem. Pages of Testimony and testimonies given by survivors and family members sometimes contain a wealth of information: names of siblings and parents, places of residence before the war, and the fate of family members. A single Page of Testimony can open up a whole branch of a family.

3. 3

   Continue to the Arolsen archive and further records

   Only once the basic details are clear do I approach the Arolsen archive in Germany, which holds an extensive collection of documents on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. Well-established details make it possible to identify the right person with confidence, even when the name appears with a different spelling.

   Name, date, place and prisoner number can help identify records relating to the same person. Personal details, however, may change, and the same person sometimes appears under different numbers. So it is important to compare several details rather than rely on a single match.

   In this way a sequence of places and dates can be built up gradually, sometimes revealing a subcamp or a labour site the family never knew about.

4. 4

   Approach the archives of the camps and the memorial sites

   Not all the information is held in one database. The archives of memorial sites and camps may hold prisoner records, administrative documents, work lists and other sources that can complete the picture.

   During the research on my grandfather I corresponded, among others, with the memorial sites at Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, as well as with other sites and archives, including Majdanek and Terezín and state archives in Poland and Germany.

   This work requires patience: identifying the right institution, formulating a request, following up on replies and sometimes dealing with documents in different languages. The information sought is not always found, but every reply can help determine the next step.

5. 5

   Connect the documents to the history

   A document may tell us where a person was and when. To understand what was happening around them, one also needs to know the historical context.

   Transfers between camps, for example, may be connected to labour needs, to the evacuation of a camp or to the advance of the Soviet army in the last months of the war. Context helps explain the meaning of the dates and places, but it is important to distinguish between what the document records explicitly and a possible historical explanation. It is not always possible to know for certain why a particular person was transferred or what they experienced at each station.

6. 6

   Continue into the period after the war

   A person's life course does not necessarily end with liberation. Records from displaced persons camps, immigration documents, testimonies given years later and compensation files may teach us about what happened later in life, and sometimes add information about the war period itself.

It is not always possible to complete the whole route

Even thorough research does not guarantee that every station will be found. Many documents were lost, others were never created, and sometimes gaps remain that cannot be resolved.

The aim is not to fill the gaps with guesses, but to build the most accurate picture possible: to document the places and dates that were located, to keep the documents the findings rest on, and to distinguish between well-founded facts and questions that remain open.

What does the family receive?

At the end of the research a family can be shown a timeline, a map of the places that were located, copies of documents and an explanation of their historical significance. In this way a list of names and dates becomes a broader picture of a person's life.

For me, the research on my grandfather was also a personal journey. I began with a partial family story, with memories I did not know how to interpret, and I gradually discovered further stations in his life. Not every question was answered, but I learned that it is possible to come closer to a story through patient work with documents, cross-referencing sources and familiarity with the period.

Sometimes all it takes in order to begin is one detail that can be checked.

If all that is known in your family is the name of a camp, a prisoner number or another partial detail, that may be the thread from which the research can begin.