What does one write about when a school history society requests a contribution? Clearly it must have something to do with history, but then I am no academician, nor a politician, and could not make any worthy contribution in those fields. Despite this, it is a fact that I have been asked. At 76 I have enough life experience to know that filling in magazines is a hard task. Not too many people volunteer, and the younger generation deserves support in their effort to combat modern reluctance to support communal work.
I am a product of two German Jews who had the foresight to flee Germany to Palestine as early as 1933. My mother was thrown out of the Freiburg University where she had hoped to qualify as a doctor. The Palestine doors were shut rather tightly to immigration, but the then immense sum of £1000 capital performed a magical opening of that Gate. The British, who administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate welcomed those with capital, and the £1000 was the minimum amount for which they were willing to issue an entry visa. My mother was 21 years old, entirely unqualified to start a new life in an alien country where she knew virtually no one. There was no medical school at that time at which she could continue her studies. She knew almost nothing of the Hebrew language. She had been protected in the safety of an academic family–and there she was, alone, with only Zionist songs learned in Germany to guide her hopes and aspirations.
My father, six years older than my mother, grew up in the Danzig area. At the tender age of six his parents had sent him to live in the home of his oldest sister, because Golub, where he had been born, had become Poland, taken away from the Germans at the end of World War I. In the same year, 1933, my father was working for a menswear firm with numerous retail outlets in the Danzig area. His job was to collect the takings from these and so he always had large sums of money on him. Consequently he had a license to carry a side arm and owned one. On one fateful day the Hitler Youth sidled up to him and said that they thought it was high time that he contributed to the Party. At that point my father went to the police station, identified himself, produced his license and surrendered the gun. From the police he went to the nearest railway station and left the country for Palestine without ever going home again. The reality, however, was that my father was an “illegal immigrant” and much more street-wise. He soon managed to find employment in Palestine.
My mother’s family had a different tale to tell. My maternal grandfather’s passport had been confiscated in Ludwigshafen by the Nazi regime because as Chief Research Chemist he was an “important asset.” Ludwigshafen lies on the river Rhine, and on the opposite side of Mannheim. An agreement was struck between my grandfather and his employers whereby he gave up all his rights, all his patents, any claims to employment or compensation. For that the company re-employed him on the other side of the river as an export salesman. He was well known in Ludwigshafen—but not in Mannheim. As an exports representative he required a passport, which the company obtained, and when that arrived, my grandparents boarded a ship and jumped off in London.
The “Yekkes,” as the German Jews in Palestine were nicknamed, had an extensive networking community and soon these two people met and married. I was the product of this union and had my first 15 years in Palestine which in 1948 became Israel. My father found work in a bus cooperative. My mother was never able to return to medicine and earned her living in looking after newborns in the first few weeks of their lives.
A divorce in 1947, the war of independence and the hardship of life eventually forced my mother to re-join her family who had managed to get out of Germany in 1938. So at age 15, I came to live in England and completed my schooling here.
My wife grew up in South Africa. Her parents, like mine, had to effectively start from scratch and certainly changed direction from the point of view of employment. Refugees cannot pick and choose—as we well know looking at the refugees’ situation nowadays. Thus the banker initially became a typewriter-ribbon salesperson.
Both my wife and I grew up in a very small family. We both knew of relatives who had died in the Shoah. Contact with other families ended because those who managed to escape or survived the horrors of World War II had scattered literally right across the globe. Communication in the era where not every household had a telephone was nearly impossible. Calls were very expensive. At times you had to make an appointment with a telephone operator who allocated a certain amount of time when you could call. Often telephone lines were shared with other subscribers. Letters took weeks to travel and could only go to those of the family known to be alive. Certainly no one had the Internet. Life was too harsh—contact with family was lost…
I always had the desire to show that with all the destruction of World War II, the one thing the Nazis did not succeed in was to destroy our knowledge. It would “only” take time and effort to reconstruct some of the lost personal histories… It was only after I had retired from having to earn my living that I finally had the time—and the tools—with which to try to learn who our relatives were. That was the impetus and beginning of my personal study of genealogy.
It was sheer luck that at that stage the Internet was developing. People with a common purpose from across the world banded together. Jewishgen.org was created with the effort of many people who did not know each other. I joined that.
When you subscribe to a genealogy group, messages from unknown strangers pour into your computer. Some ask for help, others give advice and guidance. One day a message came which read “can someone help me to find my mother…. “ — the fuller story is at http://www.remember.org/unite/betty.htm.
The emotion and experience of this made me realize that 60 to 70 years after the events of World War II there were still so many people around who wondered whether maybe someone from their family had survived the war after all.
That is how I came to create Search and Unite. My son created a website for it (sons knew how, fathers had no idea at that stage) and soon people from across the world began to make contact. In my retirement and quest for our personal family I had created an “organization.” Hundreds of searches have come about. An amazing number have resolved successfully. It has kept me full time at the computer and on the phone. It certainly keeps me young. Every search is akin to saying Kaddish over someone’s grave. It has brought about numerous family reunions. Total strangers who in many cases did not know they still had family are being re-joined.
There is nothing “magic” about the research. Of course each case has a different story, different initial facts and suppositions. Dr. Edward De Bono coined the phrase “Lateral Thinking,” which is so important in guiding the research. “Where could I possibly find the answer to xyz” is the route map. The other guiding principle: “Never assume!” We have huge repositories on the Internet where someone has recorded facts. One example: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem lists a database of victims. Mostly the names and addresses of the contributors are there as well — see http://db.yadvashem.org/names/advancedSearch.html?language=en.
There are archives in every country; there are people willing to help everywhere. It is actually quite a revelation to learn that in our age, where the initial reaction to a stranger is “he wants to swindle me,” there are so many who willingly do the exact opposite! All it needs is time, patience and perseverance.
Initially it was all people searching for people, and as the survivors were departing our world, the emphasis turned more to locating the heirs of owners of looted art in Austria and former family homes in the Czech Republic as people were looking for their one-time owners because they still had a right to reclaim their family property.
My activities in Search and Unite, though initially specifically Shoah-based were never restricted to just that. It was neither morally acceptable, nor practical, to choose. Whilst the majority of victims may have been Jews, there were endless others who suffered as well. I learned that war is the most awful activity brought about by man, repeated all too often wherever people exist. Slogans such as “war to end all wars” from World War I are just that: slogans. People caught up in all wars suffer, irrespective of which side they happen to be. My dearest wish would be that others duplicate and clone what I have done. Families Wikipedia lists 130 wars between 1945–1989. www.war-memorial.net lists a further 34 since 1989! In every war there are people dispossessed, families torn apart.
Maybe others will do for those conflicts what I was privileged to do? I wish!!!
By David Lewin, Founder of Search and Unite
