After 50 years, Holocaust archive going public

Millions of requests for help
Over the years, the International Tracing Service has answered 11 million requests to locate family members or provide certificates supporting pension claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent rate of success in tracing the requested name.

But the workload has been overwhelming. Two years ago it had a backlog of nearly half a million unanswered queries. Director Blondel says the number was whittled down to 155,000 this summer and will disappear by the spring of 2008. New queries have slowed to just 700 a month.

One of ITS’ critics is Sabine Stein, archivist at the Buchenwald concentration camp 150 miles from Bad Arolsen. She says the archive’s refusal to share its files has caused heartbreak to countless survivors and their descendants.

For instance, in 1989, Emilia Janikowska asked ITS to trace her father, Ludwig Kaminski, a coal miner from Poland who was never heard from again after his arrest in 1939. It took more than three years to send her a standard form reporting Kaminski had died in Buchenwald Dec. 1, 1939.

But there was more she could have been told.

Documents copied by the U.S. Army before they went to Bad Arolsen, which were seen by AP at Buchenwald, include mention of Kaminski. They say he was prisoner No. 8578, that he had arrived in Buchenwald six weeks earlier with 600 other Poles and had been placed in Camp 2. The known history of Buchenwald says Camp 2 was a wooden barracks and four big tents, jammed with 1,000 Poles and Vienna Jews. Dozens of inmates died from the cold that winter. The cause of Kaminski’s death was pneumonia.

No one ever told his daughter any of this.

“We had no news from my father since the moment he was arrested,” Janikowska said when contacted at her home in Krakow, Poland. She now wants more information for a compensation request.

Archivist Stein says: “Former inmates and their families want to see some tangible part of their history; they want to tell their stories,” she said. “What I find most frustrating is that they have all these documents and they are just sitting on them.”

Making amends
Earlier this month, ITS went some way to make amends, delivering a full inventory of its records on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in searching for 1,000 names Stein had requested.

Compounding the delay in releasing the files is the cumbrous makeup of the governing committee. Any decision on their future requires the assent of all 11 member nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

Last May’s agreement to open the archive stipulates that it will remain off-limits until formal ratification by the 11 governments. After that, each of the 11 countries can have a digital copy of the files and decide who has access to it.

But some delegations are worried the process will take too long, at a time when aged survivors are dying every day.

“What victims of these crimes fear the most is that when they disappear — and it’s happening very fast now — no one will remember the names of the families they lost,” said Shapiro of the Washington museum, who was a delegate to the talks.

“It’s not a diplomatic timetable, and not an archivist’s timetable, but the actuarial table. If we don’t succeed in having this material public while there are still survivors, then we failed,” he said.

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