The Arolsen Archives and evidence of lingering hope

A recent attempt to learn more about the fate of my great-grandparents, Georg and Else, led to the Arolsen Archives and the discovery of a Red Cross Enquiry made by my grandfather in 1946, when he was 20 years old.

This is a single-page tracing request with scant information, and yet is a deeply human, personal document that carries within its bureaucratic form a suggestion of my grandfather's grief, as well as the lingering hope that his parents might still be alive. The handwriting, which I'm confident is his own, collapses the distance between the page's administrative purpose and the personal anguish it records.

A poignant detail is the sentence "Last heard of to have some work in camp in Silesia".

Georg and Else were interned at a camp in Riebnig, Germany (now Rybna, Opole Voivodeship, Poland) where they would have been forced into labour in the surrounding forest, collecting wood to strengthen the banks of the Oder. Deportees were reported to have drowned in the river there, as well as succumbing to illness due to malnutrition and poor conditions in the camp.

I've no idea how Frank received word that his parents had been deported from Breslau to Riebnig, but if they did so by writing to him, it seems that they played down the nature of their internment. Another possibility is that the clerk who typed up this detail chose the phrase "to have some work" as a kind of bureaucratic euphemism that masks the reality of persecution. Either way, I think it stands as a small but telling ambiguity in the record.

The Charlottenstraße address was the family home that Frank left, as Fritz Walter, in 1939. Unbeknownst to him, Georg and Else had been forced to move home twice since, to "Judenhaus" at Wallstraße and Augustusstraße, before being deported to Riebnig in 1941.

They were deported to Auschwitz on 5 March 1943, via their hometown of Breslau, in a perverse sort of 'homecoming' that might have briefly raised their spirits, as they likely wouldn't have been informed of their ultimate destination.