by Leah Goldstein

At the beginning of January this year, Yad Vashem received an appeal from Holocaust survivor Moshe Bar-Yuda to discover the fate of his father, Alfred (Avraham) Kastner, murdered during the Shoah. Bar-Yuda’s request was timely: although Yad Vashem had already received Pages of Testimony regarding Kastner’s disappearance just before Passover 1942, the trail had run cold. However, due to the recent transfer of some 20 million digitized documents to Yad Vashem by the German-based International Tracing Service (ITS), Bar-Yuda was able to find out exactly where—and when—his father died.

Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Moshe Bar-Yuda was only eight years old when he saw his father for the last time. Through a number of false identities, Moshe managed to survive the Holocaust in Hungary, and came to Eretz Yisrael before the end of the war. A Tel Aviv rabbinical court released his mother from her married status in 1948, and over the years, Moshe heard rumors that his father had been murdered at Majdanek, or possibly at Auschwitz.

The first document to provide a reliable explanation of Kastner’s fate was a record already contained in Yad Vashem’s Archives, listing deportees to the Novaky camp in Slovakia. The list indicates that Moshe’s memory was accurate: the deportation took place on the eve of “Shabbat Hagadol,” 27 March 1942 (9 Nissan 5702). Recently received documents from the ITS then helped complete the picture: Kastner’s name appears on a crematoria list of people murdered in Majdanek on 7 September 1942 (25 Elul 5702). The list was only received by the ITS in the 1960s, and was therefore not included in ITS documents photographed by Yad Vashem a decade earlier.

“After saying kaddish for my father for 60 years on the general day of mourning (10 Tevet), now he has a specific yahrtzeit,” said Bar-Yuda on receiving the new information. “And while it doesn’t comfort me, or make me happy, there is a kind of satisfaction here. I can now move forward.”

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Bar-Yuda’s tale shows how the newly expanded collection of records can help the families of Holocaust victims. “This story demonstrates how the 75 million documents collected by the Yad Vashem Archives, in conjunction with the millions of new documents that have recently arrived and will continue to arrive from the ITS archive in Germany over the next two years, can help individuals fill in the picture about the fate of their loved ones in the Holocaust.”

Director of the Yad Vashem Archives Dr. Haim Gertner explains that since February, the number of people applying to Yad Vashem for further information about missing relatives has increased by some 50%. “In the last few months we have processed data searches on some 2,000 Holocaust victims,” he remarks. “Some of the applicants had previously applied to us, and are now asking for additional information about their relatives; others are making their requests for the first time. The addition of the ITS documents to our own vast collection offers us new possibilities, and enhances our ability to trace the fate of people during the time of the Holocaust.”

Requests for searches may be submitted via an online form available on the Yad Vashem website: www.yadvashem.org, or by regular mail.

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