Holocaust survivors presumed dead, much later reunited with their loved ones

[Wetzelrad]

There seems to be no shortage of these stories in the news archives. Would it be useful to start compiling a list of them? The consistent story beat is that they assumed their relatives were killed after they stopped receiving word, but they actually survived. Often the reunions are filmed.

To start things off, here is 102yo Eliahu Pietruszka meeting with the son of his brother Volf in 2017. Both Eliahu and Volf believed they were sole survivors. They may have been separated by the Iron Curtain. In 2005 Volf gave Yad Vashem pages of testimony for the deaths of Eliahu and his other family members. This sat in Yad Vashem's database from 2005 until 2017 when another relative discovered it, leading to the reunion.

https://www.yadvashem.org/events/20-november-2017.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Gewy40Ej4

[borjastick]

Good topic Wetzelrad and one I have been commenting on for years here. There seem to be several reasons or excuses why the 'survivors' think their family were murdered, killed in the camp system.

Firstly there is the old chestnut 'we never saw them again' followed quickly by the 'they must have died because they never return to 22 Acacia Avenue after the war' routine and then the final one of 'I was told they were gassed at Auschwitz'.

As I mentioned the other week here there is a whole slew of facebook posts about jews 'murdered in Auschwitz etc blah blah blah but never any proof for these claims.

Building a list would not only be useful but also highly enteraining especially on these dark and cold winter days.

[HeiligeSturmV2]

Josef Kleinmann was presumed dead and didn't know his original name for a long time.
"After the war he ended up in Russia and was given the name Peter Grünfeld. In 1979 he emigrated to Israel with his wife and daughter and went in search of his roots." - from the now partially defunct site vpro.nl/

"A Jew who passed by adopted him and gave him his name ̶ Peter Grünfeld. Some time passed before Pepíček discovered his true identity. Peter Josef Grünfeld Kleinmann."
https://www.yadvashem.org/remembrance/a ... /2017.html

Kleinmann.jpg (164.02 KiB) Viewed 821 times

Archivist: According to this card, you are dead.
You are listed under the deceased.
I have to cross you out.

Josef Kleinmann: It says that I am dead?

Archivist: Yes.

Josef Kleinmann: No, I am alive!

Archivist: Well...but...

Josef Kleinmann: I am alive!

Archivist: It was like that...

Josef Kleinmann: I am alive.

Archivist: ...very few documents have been preserved...

Josef Kleinmann: This has to be corrected, I am alive.

From De zoektocht van Josef Kleinmann (The Quest of Josef Kleinmann)
(KRO, 1993, 12min 30sec)


Kleinmann died in 2017 and apparently didn't find his sister.

[borjastick]

First of all I would want to know about the list he was reading. What list, where was it from and how was it compiled?

It's an old chestnut here as I have mentioned several times over the years but it fits this topic perfectly. That is the story of my ex mother in law's brother in law, a very lovely guy from Canada. A jew who was born early thirties if memory serves, in Munich. Before the war he and his parents and some other family members fled to the UK. After the war he and his parents went to Canada. Many years later they went back to Munich and into a holocaust museum or records office and found that they were all listed as killed in or victims of the holocaust. Of course this was not true and they told the official there their story.

It was a case of there before the war, not there after the war, jewish thus must have died in the holocaust and were recorded as such.

On this first page alone we have accounted for this massive anomally in recorded jewish holocaust deaths.

[HeiligeSturmV2]

Benjamin Steiner
(1935-2017)

“I was one of the children who were selected by this nice smiling officer, Karl Hoecker. We were escorted away from the rail yard to a building that looked like a hospital ward.
Benjamin Steiner had survived 10 months in Auschwitz when it was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.

The Red Cross organised for Benjamin to be sent to a refugee camp in Denmark and later he found his parents who, miraculously, were still alive.

It took a year for then to reunite, during which time he didn’t know if he still had a living parent, and his parents didn’t know if their only child had survived."

The man who survived Dr Mengele - Newsroom (09/04/2017)
https://newsroom.co.nz/2017/04/09/surviving-dr-mengele/

One explanation why people did not find their relatives after the war:
"During the war, Ben’s father had been taken by the Germans to work as an engineer, assembling V1 and V2 rockets and ammunition. When D-Day came his father was caught by the British and taken to a prisoner of war camp in England. It took months for them to determine he was a genuine prisoner. Ben’s mother had been seconded to the Eastern Front where she worked in a camp as a doctor for German soldiers. It was the middle of 1946 before he was reunited with his parents."

Benjamin Steiner - Jewish Lives
https://www.jewishlives.nz/our-people/benjamin-steiner

[Wetzelrad]

Building a list would not only be useful but also highly enteraining especially on these dark and cold winter days.

Well, I question making a list because I'm not sure what purposes it would serve. If the purpose is merely to show that the Holocaust's presumed dead includes people who are in fact alive, then any single example serves to make that point. And other points. It's not worth my spending hours digging through news stories without a more definite goal. As I recall, ConfusedJew had once argued against me that the number of such reunions are few in number, but this seems like a pretty niche claim that no one else would endorse, else I would say we should disprove it.

So out of respect for my own time, for the time being, I will merely pop in to this thread to add more stories as I come across them. Though it would not be unwelcome if someone who's good with AI wanted to send an AI on a deep dive to compile a comprehensive list. That would seem like an appropriate use case for AI.

Josef Kleinmann was presumed dead and didn't know his original name for a long time. [...]

That video is really remarkable. I titled this thread intending it to be for family reunions, but cases like Kleinmann's are definitely relevant for all the same reasons.

It's an old chestnut here as I have mentioned several times over the years but it fits this topic perfectly. That is the story of my ex mother in law's brother in law, a very lovely guy from Canada. A jew who was born early thirties if memory serves, in Munich. Before the war he and his parents and some other family members fled to the UK. After the war he and his parents went to Canada. Many years later they went back to Munich and into a holocaust museum or records office and found that they were all listed as killed in or victims of the holocaust. Of course this was not true and they told the official there their story.

If I went through this experience, it would really shake my belief in the overall event.

"It took a year for then to reunite, during which time he didn’t know if he still had a living parent, and his parents didn’t know if their only child had survived."

Reiner was 9 years old, so yet another child survivor. What's odd about his story is that it's left unsaid how he was reunited with his parents. Newsroom wrote that he "found" them, as if a child could wander around Europe and find their lost parents by chance encounter, but surely that's not how they meant it. Instead it must have been the Tracing Bureau or another agency for displaced persons. Still notable that it took a year and a half to locate and reunite them.

---

I have more to say about the example of Eliahu Pietruszka.

The entries for Eliahu's and Volf's father, mother, and brother each declare that they were "murdered" in Warsaw. This is based solely on Volf's attestations, despite his being not present. We can presume that Volf made exactly the same claim for Eliahu as well, but we're unable to see that page of testimony because it was removed after somone informed Yad Vashem that Eliahu was alive. This leaves me with a number of questions:

• How many other Holocaust persons, dead or alive, are there for which their death is attested to only by someone's "page of testimony"?
• How many more instances might there be of persons who were never fixed in Yad Vashem's database because no one bothered to verify their death?
• How many more instances might there be of pages of testimony hidden by Yad Vashem?
• In how many cases of presumed death were the families merely separated by the Iron Curtain?

[pilgrimofdark]

This book Deportations in the Nazi Era: Sources and Research is extremely interesting. It's a collection of articles by mainstream authors tracing deportations of Jews. Most of the focus is on German Jews and using the Arolsen Archives and others to trace their routes during the war.

The whole book is Open Access, so can be downloaded for free.

From the chapter "Interaction, Confusion and Potential: On the Clash between Archives (on Nazi History) and Family Research."

At the end of August 2020, the young Israeli Oded Pshetetzki, who lives in Berlin, wrote in a Facebook post that through the Arolsen Archives, his family learned that Mendel Pshetetzki, his grandfather's youngest brother, who was thought to have perished in the Holocaust, actually survived Nazi persecution and was living in Austria under the name Marian Pshetetzki.

Another chapter traces some Dutch Jews who were deported from The Netherlands to Sobibor, then transferred to Lublin/Majdanek, to Trawniki, to various labor camps, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Bergen-Belsen, and other places, finally surviving in Kaunitz or Theresienstadt. Of 70 originally selected, 13 women survived to the end of the war.

[Hektor]

,,,,
Another chapter traces some Dutch Jews who were deported from The Netherlands to Sobibor, then transferred to Lublin/Majdanek, to Trawniki, to various labor camps, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Bergen-Belsen, and other places, finally surviving in Kaunitz or Theresienstadt. Of 70 originally selected, 13 women survived to the end of the war.

That they admit or that they know of. But it's good that they already admit 13.

[pilgrimofdark]

,,,,
Another chapter traces some Dutch Jews who were deported from The Netherlands to Sobibor, then transferred to Lublin/Majdanek, to Trawniki, to various labor camps, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Bergen-Belsen, and other places, finally surviving in Kaunitz or Theresienstadt. Of 70 originally selected, 13 women survived to the end of the war.

That they admit or that they know of. But it's good that they already admit 13.

I'll summarize the article by Daan de Leeuw. I'm not adding """irony quotes""" so the words in quotes come from the article.

A total of "some" 70 were selected at Sobibor (approximately 40 men and 30 women).

The 40 men are assumed to have been killed in Operation Harvest Festival or afterwards, so we're really just tracing the women here.

Entire article here:
Mapping Jewish Slave Laborers’ Trajectories Through Concentration Camps

From Sobibor, they were sent to Lublin on the same train they arrived at from The Netherlands. When they left Lublin-Majdanek and went to Lublin Alter Flughafen, they were finally told about the gas chambers which they had miraculously survived.

4 there died from disease, violence, or gas chambers (at Lublin Alter Flughafen?).

4 died in a textile workshop: 2 from exhaustion, 1 from typhus, 1 from tuberculosis.

Of the 22, 13 volunteered for work at a Wehrmacht jam factory in Radom district.

Some of the ones who remained at Lublin Alter Flughafen "most likely" died during Operation Harvest Festival. Others miraculously survived and showed up later at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During a November selection at Auschwitz, Dr. Mengele selected some of the women to be sent west, others to remain. The ones who remained were sick but miraculously survived being sent to the gas chambers or having the color of their eyes changed or having their hands amputated and sewn on the opposite arm. They were sent later to Lippstadt, a hospital, or elsewhere.

Then in the west, the survivors were sent to other camps and armaments workshops. The group fragmented again. Some died in the late stages of the war in German retreats, which are always referred to as "death marches," which 13 miraculously survived.

So the men are mostly unaccounted for in this article. Maybe they've been traced and described elsewhere, or not traced at all beyond the Lublin camp network.