Book of Life : Genealogy: West Valley man’s work finds 160 relatives murdered by the Nazis and ensures they won’t be forgotten.

More than most people, Roman Rakover is aware of the hole, torn by the Nazis, in the fabric of every European Jewish family.

A dozen years ago, the Calabasas man sat down to compile a genealogy of the Rakover family and to write its history. The project took him five years and resulted in a book that traces 13 generations of the family, from Rakover’s great- great-great-great-great-great- grandfather and two of his brothers, down to 81-year-old Rakover, his many cousins and their children.

Recently, Rakover turned to the book to find the names of family members who died in the Holocaust. He entered the names--160 of them--onto official Pages of Testimony being collected by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and information center in Israel.

The writing of the Rakover family history and his submission of the Pages of Testimony are separate projects with a common purpose--to ensure that the Rakover name is remembered despite the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate every Jewish family.

According to Shraga Y. Mekel, development director of the New York-based American Society for Yad Vashem, the 160 names will be recorded in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names.

“This Hall of Names in Yad Vashem is the symbolic tombstone for the millions of victims who never had real tombstones,” Mekel said. “This is the way these people will be remembered.”

Since Yad Vashem began collecting the names of Jews who died in the Shoah (the Hebrew word for Holocaust) in 1955, it has uncovered the names of more than 3 million victims of Hitler’s war against the Jews. On April 12 of this year, the official Day of Remembrance for Holocaust victims, Yad Vashem began a push to collect the names of the remaining 3 million people murdered by the Nazis.

He described the project as a “historic mission” that becomes more urgent as survivors such as Rakover grow older.

Rakover’s contribution is unusual in the large number of victims he was able to identify and the amount of information he had collected on many of them, Mekel said.

Where many survivors can remember only the names of those who perished, Rakover spent years collecting as much data as possible on every family member in the course of putting together his personal history book.

As a result, he could report to Yad Vashem the following about Floride Weindling, one of the many youngsters among his 160: that she was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and was only 4 years old when she was sent, with her parents, to her death in Auschwitz in 1942. Only her 19-year-old brother, Frederick, survived.

Floride’s face also survives. There is a photograph of the serious-looking little girl in a pretty, light-colored dress with dark trim, her hair lovingly combed, preserved in Rakover’s book.

As Rakover explained recently, leafing through his book, his family originally came from a small Eastern European city called Rakow, the source of the family name, traditionally spelled Rakower. From there, the family moved to Krakow, in what is now Poland.

“Our family lived there from 1650, according to my figuring, in the same city . . . until Hitler came in 1939,” said Rakover, who was born in Krakow in 1918.

His side of the family made barrels and owned a cooperage. Anti-Semitism and violence against Jews were commonplace in Poland when he was growing up, Rakover recalled. There were strict quotas limiting the number of Jews admitted to universities. In the years immediately preceding the Nazi invasion, Jewish students had to stand during classes, unlike their Christian peers.

Rakover had planned to become a veterinarian, but his studies were ended by the German invasion. His father and Rakover’s only sibling--older brother Gustaw--ended up in the Soviet Union, where both died. Rakover survived, making ammunition for the Nazis in a series of labor camps.

Scattered throughout the world as a result of the Holocaust, Rakowers, or Rakovers, settled in Germany, Belgium, France, Israel, England, Venezuela, Brazil, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the United States. One family member remains in Krakow, Rakover said, although he never returned after he left Poland in 1948.

Reunited with his mother after the war, Rakover went first to Paris, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1952 he came to the United States, where he managed office-machine companies until his retirement.

For Rakover, the fact that some of the surviving Rakovers ended up in Tasmania, others in Florida, underscored the importance of discovering and sharing the story of a family that had lived in Krakow for hundreds of years and whose members had included such notables as 50 or 60 rabbis.

“We didn’t come from the moon,” he said. “We came from someplace, and we have a tremendous history.”

“The young family didn’t know each other,” he said of the postwar Rakovers. “So the family should not disappear as a unit, I decided to do the book.”

The first piece of the family puzzle to fall into place was a congratulatory poem a Polish contingent of the family had sent to a New York-based member on the occasion of his marriage. Dated Jan. 4, 1903, the document in German begins “Long Live the Newlyweds” and contains the signatures of 31 family members. Now hung in Rakover’s West Valley home, the document was given to him by the bridegroom’s daughter, Cecil, who died in Miami in 1985 at the age of 80.

His interest piqued, Rakover began searching for his roots. Aided by his knowledge of Polish, German, French, Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as English, he turned to the vast genealogical resources of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for assistance. With its help, he obtained such invaluable documents as family birth certificates, which gave the addresses of houses where babies were born, dates and parents’ names. He became expert at gleaning every speck of information from such documents as wedding certificates.

Thus, he learned that the brother of his great-great-grandfather was only 13 when he married in 1805 (the bride was an older woman of 14).

“Any kind of genealogy has to work like a chain. It has to be hooked up,” said Rakover, who went from one generation to the next, filling in the names of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

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Whenever possible, he incorporated family stories into the growing record. Thus, when he recorded the known facts about Rabbi Kaon Eliakim Getzel, of Rakow, who died in 1758, Rakover also reported the family legend: that the rabbi kept three bags of coins, one full of gold, one of silver, the third of copper. When a needy young woman came to him seeking a dowry, he would dig into the bag of gold. A handful of copper coins would suffice to buy Sabbath dinner for a poor family.

Rakover wrote to his far-flung family members, asking them to remember all they could about their relatives. Later, he distributed 126 copies of the finished book to members of the family.

“Everybody knows a little bit,” he said. “When you put every little bit together, you can get a whole book.”

Rakover said his wife, Sylvia, who died in 1992, “worried that no one would appreciate the time and effort I put into the book. I said, ‘Listen, if four or five of my relatives would appreciate it, that’s enough for me.’ ”

After 1939, the chilling names of death camps began to appear in the family record--Plaszow, Majdanek, Auschwitz. Rakover said he was not depressed as he copied these names onto the Pages of Testimony.

“I am living with this every day,” he said. “I didn’t find it depressing. It is my obligation.”

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When he has the opportunity, Rakover urges other survivors to add the names that matter to them to Yad Vashem’s list.

Like the Hall of Names or the thousand trees that the Rakovers planted in a memorial forest in Israel, Rakover’s book is a way to keep the dead alive in memory.

“If you read the book,” he said, “the people didn’t die. They are sitting around the table because we are talking about them. This book brought all these people back from the grave. Because we are remembering, they are alive, not physically but spiritually.”

Thus is remembered little Floride, who grew solemn when faced with a camera, murdered in Auschwitz before she was 5.