The Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of gypsies, gay men and women, and opponents of the Nazi regime, is perhaps the greatest war crime in modern history. However, there were tens of thousands of survivors and many more families where loved ones were lost or scattered around the world as the result of the madness that engulfed Europe between 1933 and 1945. In reality there were two separate holocausts. Not every victim died in a concentration camp like Auschwitz; millions of men, women and children were murdered in cold blood in villages and towns across Russia and Eastern Europe by special Einzatzgruppen or in extermination camps, such as the one at Treblinka.
There is a mass of information available about the victims, as well as the survivors. Detailed records were kept by the Nazis. Although there are some gaps, many important sources survive. But, as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum points out: ‘There is no single list of victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. Instead, researching an individual’s story during the Holocaust is a process of following trails and piecing together bits of information.’ For researchers it is much harder to find out about those who were murdered by the death squads across Eastern Europe,
