When the death camps were liberated, thousands of Jewish survivors had no notion about whether their family members were still alive. Many others were eager to contact relations in the U.S., but had no records of their relatives’ addresses. When families managed to reunite, it was often thanks to a column in the Yiddish-language Forverts (or Forward)—then America’s leading Jewish newspaper—which had been involved in such efforts since its founding in 1897. Andrew Silverstein writes:
By World War I, the family-search inquiries evolved into their own column, Seeking Relatives, which ran until the late 1970s. For decades, the Forward did not charge to publish the items; it was a public service. Thousands of lives were forever changed by the column: individuals rescued, families reunited, borders crossed, history shaped.
Letters poured into the Forward building on 175 East Broadway from every continent except Antarctica. They were written in Yiddish, English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Ladino. Some are multi-page outpourings of tremendous suffering, with photos enclosed. Others are the briefest of notes to loved ones.
I discovered that thousands of original, hand-scrawled Seeking Relatives letters sent to the Forward had found their way to the archives of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem. Isaac Metzker, a Yiddish novelist and longtime Forward editor who left Europe in the 1920s, had donated them along with other Holocaust-related clippings and testimonies in 1951. “Every ghastly story he receives can be found in his desk drawer,” [the publication’s celebrated] editor Ab Cahan wrote of Metzker in 1947.
The Forward received communiqués from German Jews held by the British in the Mauritius Islands after being denied entry into Palestine; malnourished families in Soviet camps in Uzbekistan; penniless refugees marooned in Morocco; and Jews who had been evacuated from Gibraltar to Jamaica.
Silverstein goes on to recount some of these moving stories.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/culture/555245/seeking-relatives-forverts-column-letters-holocaust-survivors