Book Description

This brief book has been designed as a handbook for anyone doing research to identify Holocaust victims and find survivors. It serves two purposes for the researcher: it annotates the principal sources worldwide for Holocaust information and explains the rudimentary steps necessary for accessing that material. The author, a noted Jewish genealogist, followed his own advice during a 15-year search for members of his extended family. This publication, the result of that investigation, is written for the beginning researcher. The major difference between this work and other books on the Holocaust is that it focuses on individuals, not events. Much of the information will be useful also to students researching the Holocaust era and those looking for material with which to refute the claims of revisionists. The book notes the various types of documents that contain needed information and tells where they are and how to get them. Mokotoff gives readers advice on the best ways to request data from international sources, points out what types of documents might hold the most relevant information, and lists agencies that deal with survivors. The section on museums, libraries, and other institutions with Holocaust collections will be useful for all types of research. The illustrations of pages from documents are those that Mokotoff obtained for his own research. Appendixes include a current bibliography with books on generic genealogical searching, statistics about Jewish victims, lists of towns that published memorial books to commemorate victims, more than 4,000 European towns for which there is documentation at Yad Vashem in Israel, Holocaust resource centers, and a list of members of the Mokotoff family murdered during the Holocaust. The author's conversational writing style and easy-to-follow directions make this an appropriate handbook for the uninitiated. Public libraries might want to include it in genealogy collections, but it should be made accessible to all patrons interested in Holocaust information.--BL 11/01/1995.