Yet another survivor

Who were the Holocaust victims?

Database hopes to document lives of the dead

The lives of thousands of Holocaust victims are coming to light in a new database that allows anyone with an Internet connection to research the fate of family members and friends sent to Nazi death camps.

[…]

One of the early users was Jerry Zeisler, a 50-year-old business consultant from Leesburg, Va., who logged on within hours of the launch Nov. 22 to search for members of his mother’s family. He and his sister, Bonnie Frederics of Tucson, Ariz., worked simultaneously while e-mailing each other.

Among the testimonies they found were those of Zlata Adelson, a great-grandmother of theirs who was born in Butrimantz (Butrimonys), Lithuania, in 1879, and Benzion Adelson, her son born in 1911. Zeisler and Frederics knew that Zlata and Benzion had died in 1941 because they were listed in a postwar account of the Jews of Butrimantz — one of many such books, called yizkor, written by survivors who wanted to chronicle the lives of those who had died.

They also hit upon a surprise: The person who submitted the victims’ names, in 1955, was Reuven Adelson, another son whom surviving family members assumed had died in the Shoah with his mother and brother. […]

[…]


Source:

By Bill Broadway

The Washington Post

January 25, 2005

www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/

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