Example – Search for relatives lost in the shoa

In April 2004 we recieved a letter from Mrs. L. in East Berlin. She wrote: "After reading an article in the paper Tagesspiegel I was hoping for many years an internet expert could help me in finding information about my grandfather". This article to which she was referring was entitled »Thanks to a Search Engine an Englishman Found Out, After More Than 50 Years, What Happened to His Grandfather in Auschwitz«. It contained the story of a woman who had found the name of a friend's grandfather on a deportation list on the internet. The friend, Elliot had been wondering his entire life, what had happened to his grandfather. After decades it now became possible to find both closure and relief. Many descendants of the Jews murdered in the Shoa are in this exact situation: the uncertainty is painful, but thay they don't know where to find answers? Who can help? Mrs. L. from East-Berlin had been asking herself  similar questions. "My grandfather was married to a nurse from Luxembourg. She had to emigrate to the USA without him. I'm not sure what path of  to safty he wanted to take. I only remember he was captured in France". If her memory was correct, we knew he would have been handed over to the Germans in the occupied north of France by the Vichy Governement like thousands of others had been. We conducted research and were able to find the carthatic answer for Mrs. L. We ascertained that her grandfather was deported on May 15, 1944 from the Camp of Drancy northeast of Paris to Kaunas or Reval in the Baltic. Transport No. 73 had 878 people. Because only 68 men from this transport survived we have to assume that her grandfather died in one of the two Baltic towns.