We recently toured the “Anne Frank House” exhibit visiting the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

It was an amazing exhibit, very well curated, showing the history of the family of Otto and Edith Frank before the war. Otto was the only member of the 8 who hid in the Annex who survives the war.

Of the many original artifacts on display in this exhibit, one caught my eye as a genealogist. They had a document which marked Otto Frank as a Displaced Person (DP). The United Nations Refugee Relief Agency (UNRRA) created DP Identity cards to mark individuals who had come to the International Relief Organization (IRO) for help in the chaos that followed the end of the war. Here is one example of these identity cards; they have useful biographical information and are well worth the trouble of getting. Many of them can be found at the Arolsen Archives.

If you or someone you know has a relative who was caught up in the Holocaust, or in the related destruction in Europe during World War II, check out the Arolsen Archives. Located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the Arolsen Archives (International Center on Nazi Persecution) inherited the files of the International Tracing Service. The ITS was run by the UNRRA and then later the International Relief Organization as a centralized location for the search for family members lost or displaced in the upheaval of WWII. The Arolsen Archives has over 30 million documents in paper files. A small fraction of these documents have been digitized and indexed online as an aid to finding the non-digitized documents.

For example, a search for Otto Frank born 12 May 1889 in the Arolsen Archives results in the image of a typed index card with his name and birthdate and the names and birthdates of his wife Edith and two daughters, Margot and Anne, who perished in the Holocaust. This index card is catalogued with a document ID number (130287325). To see the other documents in the file on Otto Frank, you put in a request to the Arolsen Archive for digital images of the rest of the documents. On the request, you include the name and birthdate and this document ID number, and staff or volunteers at the Arolsen Archive search in their paper files for more information about the person. It can take anywhere from 2 months to 6 months to get a reply, which might be that no other documents were found, but in this case it would include images of other documents held in the archive.

So if you are related to someone who was lost or missing during WW2, whether in concentration camps or just displaced from their war-torn homes, and whether Jewish, German, Polish, Italian, French or other nationality, try searching for records about them in the Arolsen Archives.

Or, if this task seems daunting, let me help you. It is worth the time and effort needed to find relatives who did (or did not) survive World War 2, whether they were direct ancestors or only distantly related. They deserve to be remembered.