A fascinating Long Read article by Linda Kinstler in The Guardian today, ‘The Last Nazi Hunters’: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/31/the-last-nazi-hunters.
It has been said to me by a number of people over the years that there are ‘more records’ out there than we have had access to, to date, and this article would seem to verify that supposition.
Linda Kinstler’s piece raises a number of interesting questions for those of us who lost family in the Shoah, and asks some key questions: about the painstaking nature of the investigation of historical crime; about the motivations involved (in the present more than in the past, perhaps); and about the issue of ‘costs’ of various kinds.
Those of the second generation, in common with many survivors, often have a driving need to know ‘what happened’ to their missing family members. Traditionally, after all, people have a grave or other memorial to visit, but in our case there is most often nothing – not even the certainty of a date, or a death certificate.
The suggestion here, that there may be much more information still to be released, may be helpful to those of us who continue to look back both ‘in need’ and in commemoration.