Israeli Effort Aims to Prove Holocaust : Survivors of Nazis Document Their Dead

To Anna Fischer, the Holocaust was all too real. She lost her parents, four brothers and three sisters to the Nazis, either in death camps or in the streets.

“But there are people who are trying to diminish the tragedy of the Holocaust, or even to claim that it never took place,” Fischer angrily told a stranger who phoned. “So it is very important that we come as close to the exact number as we can.”

Fischer said she is willing to tell anyone her story. Despite the quiver in her voice, one gets the impression from the fluidity of her narrative that she tells it often. It is not morbid fascination that compels her to recall the painful events of her youth. It is, in her mind, a continuing quest for truth.

Fisher and thousands of other Jews worldwide are participating in an Israeli project to document the loss of their loved ones during World War II.

50 Names Per Month

Conducted by Yad Vashem, the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, the documentation effort came to Los Angeles through the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust.

Museum Director Michael Nutkiewicz, whose Polish parents survived the war, said he has collected 50 names per month since he started in April. The museum has searched for survivors and their relatives since it was established in 1978.

It began the grim effort to learn exactly who died, Nutkiewicz said, because the result will be important to Jews and non-Jews alike.

“The problem of genocide is a very real one in our century, and it has happened repeatedly in many countries,” Nutkiewicz explained. “Studying this particular genocide of the Holocaust can be instructive from a very deep human point of view. Perhaps it will help us to prevent other tragedies.’

The Martyrs Memorial is one of 45 Holocaust museums and centers in America. It is the only one affiliated with Yad Vashem, which Israel established by law in 1953 to commemorate the Jewish people and institutions eliminated during the war. Yad Vashem began collecting names in the mid-1960s, Nutkiewicz said, and they have so far gathered 3 million.

A participant in the program fills out a form written in English and Yiddish that asks for bare details on a subject’s life and a description--if one can be provided--of his or her death.

Many Difficulties

Nutkiewicz said there are many difficulties in documenting the 6 million deaths. For example, toward the war’s end, when Jews and others rounded up by the Nazis were shipped to the gas chambers, they were not registered, he said.

“Their personal effects were also destroyed,” Nutkiewicz added. “That’s one of the more macabre aspects of this genocide--not only was their personal presence destroyed, but also their memory.”

To silence the so-called revisionists who claim the Holocaust was not as serious as reported, survivor groups, social service agencies and synagogues nationwide are taking part in the documentation effort, Nutkiewicz said.

Fischer filled out more than 20 forms for friends whom she knows to have died in the war. She also completed them in the names of her immediate family.

Fischer, 66, was born in Lodz, Poland, to a middle-class textile merchant and his wife. The family endured a four-year migration through its native land. “My sister and I were blonde and blue-eyed,” Fischer said. “We took many chances and traveled as non-Jews to sell whatever we could--cloth, family jewelry, whatever would put bread on the table.”

But someone denounced her sister as a Jew, Fisher recalled, and she was arrested and put to death. She cannot remember the date--it was one of many macabre milestones in her youth.

Fischer remembers, however, the night her father died. While hundreds of her neighbors were being loaded onto boxcars en route to the Warsaw Ghetto on Aug. 24, 1942, she said, Nazis shot her father and brother in the street.

The rest of her family perished later in concentration camps.

Denied She Was Jewish

Fischer escaped that fate by claiming she was not Jewish and applying for work as a clerk in a German military office, where she stayed for three years.

After the war, she contacted relatives in Los Angeles, who arranged for her passage here from New York in 1946.

“But I was very, very lucky,” she said. “Not so lucky to see my family disappear during this great tragedy, but I was lucky to remain alive. I will not forget them, though.”

Kerri Gertz, a UCLA therapist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Holocaust survivors, said they typically will not let themselves or others forget those who died.

“Most of them feel they have to ensure that the people who didn’t live might live on in some way,” she explained. “It’s important to them that these deaths not be minimized. Otherwise, they feel almost as guilty as if they’d committed the murders themselves.”

Nutkiewicz added another element that he feels makes the documentation effort especially urgent now. “The survivors are getting older,” he said. “We think it’s very important to capture their stories before they too are gone.”