BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.
The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.
For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the six million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.
"The Nazis took away our names and gave us numbers. Our role is to take away the numbers and give back the names," Gary Mokotoff, a genealogist who helped organize the group from Israel, the United States, Britain and Australia, said Thursday. "There is a wealth of information here."
For decades after the Second World War, the files were used only to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. But in November, the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross cleared the way for public access.
-- The Associated Press
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