Keeping Alive a Memory : Legacy: Susanne Riveles was 4 1/2 when the Gestapo executed her father. Today, she is tracking down those affected by the Holocaust and the war.

She was too young to understand what was happening. But even at 4 1/2, she knew something was wrong.

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There were strange men in her house--silent, unsmiling men wearing raincoats and heavy leather boots. At first they had asked her older brother where their father was, but when he replied that he did not know, they began rummaging through every room with an eerie sense of efficiency.

They were there for only an hour, but she still remembers their threatening silences, her wide-eyed incomprehension, the sense of fear that rolled off her brother and nanny in ever-increasing waves. Then they left, taking an eclectic assortment of items: a phonograph, her dad’s car, a few personal effects.

It wasn’t until years later that she realized what had happened. Her father, Johannes Kreiselmaier, a much-honored medical doctor who ran a military hospital, was also a member of the anti-Nazi underground. Living in Berlin, in the heart of the Reich, he had been illegally giving money and medical aid to the Resistance and to Polish women who worked as slave laborers at a factory.

The men tearing Kreiselmaier’s house apart were one of three teams of Gestapo agents sent to arrest him. Dispatched simultaneously to his home, his office and to the factory, where he had established a secret treatment center, they arrested him at the factory. He was stripped of his military rank, tortured and tried by a so-called People’s Court. Four months later, on Nov. 27, 1944, he was executed.

A lifetime later, Susanne Riveles is the keeper of her father’s flame. With a distinguished career as a human rights activist already under her belt, she is working full time for the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center, an American Red Cross project. The center helps families and friends track down the millions of people affected by the Holocaust and the war.

As director of the center’s documents project, Riveles plays a crucial role: She and more than 35 volunteers pore through thousands of World War II documents at the National Archives, trying to identify people who were deported, sent to labor camps or killed.

It is not a job for the faint of heart. Some of the documents were captured when the U.S. military liberated the death camps at the end of World War II; others were prepared by the military for war-crimes trials and many more are State Department papers--applications for U.S. passports.

The stench of death and desperation hangs over them all--more than 1,000 boxes of documents filled with endless pleas for asylum, meticulously kept lists of those sent to death, labor or concentration camps, narrative accounts of brutality and torture.

“I had a particular interest in the times,” Riveles says offhandedly when asked why she took the tracing center job a year ago. “I was hoping I would learn more about the period, not only what you learn from books.”

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She is always like this: a supremely calm, self-possessed woman in her 50s who has translated the desperate circumstances of her early life into something positive. Those who work with her are almost awed by this serenity, by the fact that she has channeled any resentment over her father’s death into what Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International USA, calls “a river of consciousness about human rights.”

Healey says Riveles, who founded and still runs Amnesty International’s Southern Africa Coordination Group, was able to “integrate her experiences in a very thoughtful, mature way. Quite often, people want to forget about those kinds of experiences, or they work from a base of anger. She’s been able to turn into a mature, thoughtful, reflective person.”

Says Diane Paul, director of the tracing center: “Although there’s a lot of anger amongst people for what happened, what I see most often is a desire to make the world a better place to live in.”

Susanne Riveles wasn’t always this way. When she was old enough to think about it, she was troubled by her father’s martyrdom, angry that he had taken a dangerous political stand and had left her behind. But that was when she had the luxury of reflection.

First she had to get through the desperate days after her father’s death. There were weeks on end when Allied bombers darkened the Berlin skies and more weeks spent hiding from the pillaging and raping of victorious Russian soldiers.

That time was complicated by another factor: While the Reich existed, she and her family were pariahs. The family was shunned by neighbors. Her mother, who knew of her husband’s activities, was interrogated by the Gestapo but was not arrested.

Riveles believes the family was given a gift by history. A week after her father was arrested, a group of German military officers attempted to assassinate Hitler. When the plot failed, the Gestapo and other security forces were so intent on rounding up the conspirators that Riveles’ family was forgotten. As she puts it: “We fell through the time.”

Then the Nazis were defeated and her father became a posthumous hero, written about and honored. But, says Riveles, “my family were still outcasts, because nobody wanted to deal with that, either.” (Her mother now 90, lives in Munich on a pension she receives from the German government.)

It was in this Orwellian world of swiftly changing truths that Riveles grew and matured. There was the constancy of her father’s sacrifice, reinforced by mention of his good works in occasional newspaper articles and books about the anti-Nazi underground.

Besides, her mother was always there to keep his legend alive, to remind her of the little things that had given him strength, like the quote from the American Socialist leader Eugene Debs that Riveles carries with her to this day: “As long as there is a lower class, I belong to it. As long as there is crime, I feel guilty. As long as there is a prisoner, I am not free.”

When she was 18, Riveles went to East Berlin to search for the records of her father’s trial. She found them easily enough and discovered a diary he had hidden in his prison cell describing three days of torture.

“He did not describe exactly what they did,” she says, “but years later I went to the prison and found that they kept people in water and at the same time beat them over a block with chains.”

At the time she found her father’s records, she had already become interested in racism, drawing a very direct line between Nazi racial policies, Jim Crow laws and South African apartheid. So it was no surprise that when she moved to the United States in 1968 to take graduate courses at Columbia University, she began working with Amnesty International in the anti-apartheid movement.

Riveles, who earned a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Munich and a doctorate in African studies from Howard University, has been on the same career track ever since.

In 1979 she helped found Amnesty International’s Southern Africa Coordination Group, which makes her, as Riveles puts it, “the resource person when it comes to issues regarding Southern Africa.” She lectures on human rights issues relating to the area and has testified before such organizations as the United Nations and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Riveles admits it can be mentally debilitating work. “Sometimes you get really depressed because sometimes you get no change; you don’t accomplish anything.”

She illustrates this with a story about a Malawian politician, what Amnesty International calls a “prisoner of conscience,” who was in jail for 10 years while Riveles tried to get him released. But he died in prison--a shattering blow, says Riveles.

Then she seems to summon some energy from a seemingly inexhaustible reserve and says, “There is a drive that keeps you going. Now my next goal is to get his wife, who’s 63 years old, out of prison.”

Riveles says has to recharge her batteries at home. She is married to an arms negotiator for the State Department. He is Jewish, and Riveles converted to that religion when she married him. They have two sons, a 20-year-old and a 26-year-old Laotian refugee.

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For Riveles, life comes down to one thing: remembering.

Never forget what your father did--and why. Never forget that history tumbles down on itself, that it’s easy to bury essential truths.

She mentions a trip to Germany last fall, when she visited the prison where her father was held. The building is in the former East Berlin and had most recently been used by the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police.

During her visit she met two men who had been imprisoned there under the Stasi; they wanted to convert the prison into a museum, a memorial to those who had suffered under the Stalinist regime.

Riveles thought this was a good idea--as far as it went. “This place has a history,” she told them. “Before the Stasi there was Gestapo. If you want to make this a museum, include that. And by the way, it was a prison before that; it served for all of these administrations. You want to bring that out.”

This is her life’s mission: bringing it out. It justifies her dreary surroundings at the National Archives, where, as she puts it, she has been “given a space” in the corner of a boringly institutional government office. So far, she and her staff have identified more than 222,000 names of possible Holocaust victims, an accomplishment she views with pride.

But there is so much more. Names to be retrieved from the musty papers, memories to be dredged up and captured. If Susanne Riveles is driven, it is because she, at least, can never forget.

“I wanted to make sure that from that experience, something would be learned,” she says of her father’s legacy. “After all, what is history worth if we do not make something of it and lead it into the present?”