This year’s Big Give Christmas Challenge is helping us to raise funds for one of the most impactful aspects of the Library’s work – our International Tracing Service family history research.
We hold the UK’s only copy of the International Tracing Service Archive – 30 million pages of Holocaust-era records, used for family research for survivors and victim families. We never charge for this work. This year we need your support to help families learn, often for the first time, the fate of lost loved ones.
Find out more below about this important work, and donate now via The Big Give.
Situation
The International Tracing Service Archive requires expert, multi-lingual researchers to navigate. Each case can take weeks to finish. We face two seemingly conflicting issues:
- To reduce response time and manage the backlog of cases which has developed since the Covid pandemic
- To raise awareness of the potential in researching family histories of the Holocaust to new audiences around the UK.
The work that can be done with our Archive is remarkable: we want to help as many people as we can, accurately and quickly.
Solution
We will work towards solving both issues: our team will be reconfigured to allow our researchers to work effectively, clearing the backlog of research cases while also responding quickly to new enquiries.
We will build capacity to efficiently manage the increase in cases resulting from our planned outreach efforts, which will raise awareness of the potential of this incredible archive to new communities, letting us help as many families as possible uncover their relatives’ fate.
“I am so grateful for this incredibly detailed research, and the way you have included all the citations, as well as suggestions for further reading. Thank you very much for your time and effort. It is very meaningful for me and much appreciated.”
Recipient of ITS family research
Case study
In 2023 a child survivor of the Holocaust visited the team hoping to get answers about what happened to her family. She didn’t know who her biological father was, or any details about her birth family beyond her mother’s name.
She was one of the ‘Windermere Children’, rescued from Theresienstadt among 700 other traumatised and orphaned children and taken to the Lake District. Through the course of searches by the ITS archive team, which involves sifting through complicated transport and camp records recorded in multiple languages, they discovered the fates of her immediate family. Despite the fact that she had previously been told her father was traced to South America in the late 1930s, she in fact discovered that her mother, father, brother and sister were all deported on the same transport to Auschwitz. All of them were murdered.
The enquirer, now in her 80s, finally knew their fates – why her father had never come looking for her, and was able to tell her children and grandchildren about their heritage. She is one of an increasing number of survivors who made similar discoveries thanks to the meticulous work of the team of researchers.
It may not sound like a positive outcome, but this research also led to her discovering cousins who she had never met and didn’t know exist. Through them she was able to see, for the first time in her life, a photograph of her mother.
Read the full story via The Telegraph: The service that is helping Holocaust survivors trace their families, 80 years later.
I never knew who I was. I did it (the ITS research) for my children’s sake as well, that they should know their heritage. If you’d interview me this time last year, I wouldn’t have known the truth. Everything changed in one year, it’s amazing.”
Recipient of ITS family history research
During the Big Give all donations are match-funded, so they have twice the impact. To find out how else you can support our work year-round, click here.
