COLUMN ONE : Searching for WWII’s Lost Souls : Thousands are still seeking loved ones lost in the Holocaust. The missing pieces to the horrific human puzzle may lie in 11 miles worth of paper documents.

It was the red snow that haunted her, that made her think of Lucy. Of Lucy, and of Auschwitz.

Friends and family kept telling Renee Duering she was living in the past, that she should try to forget what happened so long ago. She had survived the Holocaust. She has a nice home near San Francisco, a decent life, two grandsons.

But there was an emptiness in Duering, an aching void Lucy left behind. She had never had a friendship that meant so much. “I had to find her,” Duering explained simply.

Her quest, surprisingly enough, is not uncommon. Forty-seven years after World War II ended, tens of thousands of people are still searching for loved ones who disappeared during the Third Reich. Children are still looking for parents; brothers are still looking for sisters; husbands are still looking for wives, and friends are still looking for friends.

Most assume the worst--that the unaccounted for perished in the death camps. Nonetheless, they are driven to find out what happened, to know for certain, so they might have a sense of closure and move on with their own lives. Still others cling to a tiny sliver of hope, wondering if somehow, somewhere, a person they loved survived those nightmare years.

Almost inevitably, they all find themselves filling out form No. 1609 for the International Tracing Service, which then launches a free search through the 43 million documents it maintains on victims of Nazi Germany. Within those 11 miles worth of paper, from tattered prisoner identification cards printed on the backs of cigarette cartons to the dark, bulging concentration camp Death Books, lie the missing pieces to a horrific human puzzle.

“There are lots and lots of cases of families searching for one another still, and the tendency is on the rise,” said Margret Schlenke, a supervisor who has worked at the three-building complex in this central German town for 22 years.

Indeed, just when the Tracing Service had figured it would be winding down the task it began in 1945, an unexpected bounty of documents and a new surge of inquiries from the former East Bloc threaten to overwhelm the center.

“We know of 300,000 requests for information waiting in Moscow alone,” said Charles-Claude Biedermann, the Swiss director of the service, which is funded by the German government but administered by the International Red Cross. “We can’t take them all on. We would collapse.”

The Russian queries were triggered in part by a mother lode of Third Reich documents that Moscow decided to share for the first time in 1989. The International Tracing Service believes that the archives contain 600,000 new names of concentration camp inmates in ledgers that the Russians seized when they liberated camps in the East. Negotiations are under way with Moscow on how to best organize the data.

As it is, the Arolsen center receives about 700 queries a day, the majority of them from Poland and mostly from people who were deported and forced into labor for Nazi Germany. The Nazis’ former slave laborers, then as young as 13 or 14, are now entering retirement and need proof of their persecution to collect special benefits.

The center’s 400 staff members, spending an average of two years on each case, comb painstakingly through the yellowing legacy of Hitler’s reign--from Gestapo records and deportation lists to the grimly detailed Death Books--hunting for the buried clue that might reveal what happened to one person among the 14.5 million victims of Nazi persecution counted by the Tracing Service.

Duering was 22 when the Gestapo arrested the young Jewish dressmaker and her family and sent them to Auschwitz. Lucy arrived that same September day in 1943, and the two women found themselves in Block 10 of the infamous death camp--a ward where the Nazis carried out grisly medical “experiments” to sterilize Jewish women.

Over the next two years, Lucy and Duering forged a friendship born of pain and despair; they came to rely on each other for their very survival. When Duering stole a scrap of bread, she hid a piece in the hem of her coat for Lucy.

“Lucy was a quiet woman,” Duering recalled. Duering would keep her company at the window where Lucy, a newlywed from Leipzig, stood for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband. He doffed his striped cap at them and waved a clenched fist on his way to the gas chamber.

“He was telling her to have courage, to be strong,” Duering said. Her own husband, Fritz, had survived but a month in Auschwitz before she saw him on the truck trundling toward the gas chamber.

In January, 1945, with the Soviets advancing, the Nazis rounded up the Auschwitz inmates and set forth on a three-day death march to boxcars that would transport them to other camps. Duering remembers being skeletally thin and could barely walk.

“Lucy had wooden shoes and she kept slipping,” Duering recalled. “Slipping meant certain death. I had seen the red snow, the snow red with blood from people who had fallen or tried to sit a moment and were shot. I heard Lucy’s voice asking me if she could hang on to my arm.”

Clinging to one another, the two women managed to survive. Sick with typhus, Lucy then was left behind at Ravensbrueck when Duering was sent on yet another death march. By then it was April, 1945, and the war was ending. The prisoners slept in fields, and one night Duering escaped. Eventually she emigrated to Israel, then to the United States. She had the blue numbers tattooed on her wrist removed.

She tried to forget. But the image of Lucy and the red snow lingered.

Now 71, Duering cannot remember how long the search took, and the records in Arolsen would take precious weeks to unearth. “It seems to me it was 15 years in all,” she said.

When she contacted the International Tracing Service, she thought Lucy’s name was Lucy Schaefer Heinemann and that her prisoner identification number must be close to her own, since they were processed on the same day at Auschwitz.

The Arolsen archives are not open to the public and the data are too extensive and complicated to computerize, so requests like Duering’s always begin in the file cabinets where names of the persecuted are recorded on 740 million index cards.

The volume is the result of a unique filing system developed both alphabetically and phonetically, to factor in misspellings and the variations that might be found among all the nationalities registered in the Third Reich. The name Schwarz, for example, a common name meaning black in German, has 156 possible spellings, and when a request comes in, each spelling--the Polish variations, the Croatian, the Ukrainian--is checked.

“In all, there are 32 different workstations requests might navigate,” Biedermann said.

Besides Nazi records, the Tracing Service relies on personnel records from companies that employed forced laborers, police registrations, undertakers’ records, church files and myriad other bureaucratic byways that might provide answers.

The service eventually determined that Lucy’s maiden name was actually Jaeger; her married name was Heidemann, not Heinemann. They checked the logs of ships that carried postwar emigres to new countries and tracked Lucy to Sydney, Australia.

The local Red Cross contacted her to ask permission to release her whereabouts to Duering. The long-lost friends were soon chatting on the telephone; Duering flew to Australia for a monthlong reunion.

Such fairy-tale endings are relatively rare, although the Tracing Service claims a 30% to 50% success rate, counting cases where the death of the missing person can be confirmed and the searcher’s query therefore answered.

“We have 490,000 queries in the basement with no answers,” Biedermann said. The only hope for the dead-end files is if the missing person happens to contact the Tracing Service with a query of his own--a coincidence that has resolved several cases over the years.

“We have lots of sad cases,” Biedermann said. “About 7% of our work--some 10,000 queries a year--involves searching for someone. Mostly it’s second generation looking for the first: children wanting to find out what happened to their parents, if perhaps they’re still alive.”

Many of the children were left behind in Poland or another occupied land when the Nazis deported their parents as slave laborers. Others were born illegitimately to forced laborers and then put up for adoption or abandoned when the war ended.

The Tracing Service has concluded that the war produced a good many bigamists, as well. A Polish deportee forced to work as a farmhand in Bavaria, for example, may have taken a German wife after the war or married a fellow deportee, never returning to his original family back home.

“We had one case where that had happened, and it was a catastrophe for the Polish wife left behind, because her husband had been presumed dead and she had been collecting widow’s benefits, which the state promptly cut off,” Biedermann said. “It’s very frustrating, after two years of work, when we find someone’s mother, for example, but she says, no, she wants no contact, that she has built a new life or whatever and wishes to forget the past.”

The Red Cross always contacts the missing person face to face through a local chapter and asks permission to release the whereabouts. If refused, the person who initiated the search is simply told that the query regrettably did not have the desired results.

“We’re not here to play judge,” Biedermann said, “to say what’s fair or unfair. We’re here to offer humanitarian aid. We don’t lie.”

Why not at least confirm that the missing person is alive and well, without disclosing their whereabouts?

“If we told them that, they would give us no peace,” he said. “We’d get 15 letters from them. The first letter would be friendly, the next one would be begging, then the lawyers would start writing. If you say, ‘We found them but we can’t tell you,’ of course the people won’t give up.

“Maybe it sounds very brutal, but you have to be very careful with these things; you can tear apart a family,” Biedermann said.

But people who initially reject contact with searching relatives sometimes change their minds, Biedermann said, especially people found behind the former Iron Curtain, where contact with Westerners was forbidden.

Contact with the former Soviet Union and access to its extensive Holocaust records prompted the American Red Cross to establish a separate Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center in September, 1990. The Baltimore-based center serves as a clearinghouse, translating queries into German before forwarding them to Arolsen and making separate contact with appropriate agencies in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Of about 11,000 cases logged in less than two years, “about 10,000 are people trying to find out what happened to immediate family members in the war,” said Susie Kantt, administrative supervisor of the Baltimore facility.

The center is also sifting through about 400,000 names in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and forwarding the information to Arolsen.

“There are boxes and boxes--thousand and thousands of cards that were written on the backs of cigarette cartons because there was a paper shortage during the war,” Kantt said. “The cards all have the names of concentration camp prisoners and information about tools or something that was issued to them.

“These are one-of-a-kind documents. They were sitting there all along; it’s just that nobody realized the humanitarian value they might hold,” she said.

Poring over such grim statistics day in, day out, hoping against hope to find a missing survivor, can take its toll on the Red Cross researchers, Kantt admitted.

“We’ve all had bad dreams,” she said. “We all get a bit obsessed by it. We think about it a lot, and we talk about it a lot. One of our volunteers is a Polish Catholic woman who was in forced labor (camps), and she is constantly looking for names of people she knew.”

For Duering, the search for Lucy had a bittersweet ending. Seeing Duering awakened dark memories of Auschwitz that Lucy had long buried, and the relationship between the two women was strained. They still write but don’t plan to see one another again.

At one point during their visit four years ago, Lucy suddenly turned to her old friend and said, “Renee, was that you I was hanging on to on that march?”

“Just to be together with a person who went through that--you don’t have to talk about it, just be together,” Duering explained. “We are from another world. We are different. Nobody can understand us. We went through hell.”

Finding Lucy gave Duering a certain sense of satisfaction. “I had saved her life. I know now that she survived, that she lived and found a nice husband. They have a nice condo, and they’re very happy there.”

But something is still missing. “I am very lonesome,” Duering admitted. “I am still searching for something, but I don’t know what it is.”

HOW TO GET HELP

U.S. residents seeking the aid of the International Tracing Service may do so by calling an emergency services caseworker at their local chapter of the American Red Cross. They will be asked to fill out Red Cross Form 1609, information that is forwarded to Baltimore, then to the Tracing Service, if appropriate, for research and disposition.