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Today’s letter is the reply to Helene’s query in the June 21 post.
Special Registry Office, Arolsen
6 July, 1955
Dear Mrs. Cohen,
As an answer to your letter of June 21 re searching for your husband Chain Cohen, I must inform you sincerely that my office has no information. The International Search Service in Arolsen has only the information that the State Police in Vienna took your husband to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar on November 5, 1943.
Since it is possible that your husband died in the Buchenwald area after the concentration camp was liberated, I recommend that you contact the Registry Office in Weimar/Thuringia in the Soviet occupied region of Germany.
I am extremely sorry that I cannot provide more exact information.
The Arolsen Archives were formerly known as the International Tracing Service. The office was set up after World War II specifically to deal with questions about the whereabouts of prisoners sent to concentration camps. In preparing today’s post, I went to the online Arolsen Archives and found documents related to Vitali that I had never seen before. A comment handwritten on the back of one document from 1948 (presumably made in response to one of my grandmother’s queries) said “This person appeared on lists of Liberated Prisoners (compiled by the American Army)”. In several documents in my possession, I had seen references to the fact that Vitali had been reported alive at the time of liberation, but I had never seen it attributed to the American Army. However, I assume “compiled” means they wrote down the testimony of a presumed eyewitness, so I am no closer to an answer than my mother and grandmother were. It is heartbreaking to think how often their hopes for answers were dashed.
When I was young, my mother told me what a brilliant man her father was. She said he spoke around 10 languages. I always thought she must have been exaggerating — although my mother was always completely truthful. One document in the Arolsen Archives corroborated her claim — listing the (9) languages Vitali spoke: Turkish, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian (Farsi?), and German.
It was not unusual for people in those days to speak multiple languages, although I think Vitali had a longer list than most. It was useful, particularly in cosmopolitan areas, to be able to communicate with the wide variety of people passing through. Toward the end of Harry’s life, he was fascinated by the memoirs of Elias Canetti, which he read both in the original German and in English translation. I read the first volume of Canetti’s memoir to see what caught Harry’s interest. I’m guessing part of it was feeling a kinship to Canetti for being the son of a Sephardic Jew in western Europe and the other was to read his memories of Vienna in the decade before Harry was born.
Harry followed in his father’s footsteps, fascinated by any publication in any language. As a student at UC Berkeley after the war, he studied Russian and I think Japanese. He considered pursuing a career in the foreign service. By the end of his life, Harry had amassed a library of hundreds of books in dozens of languages. I sometimes wondered whether that was also a way of hiding in plain sight – an interest in multiple languages could hide the fact that he had not been born in the US.
Harry kept his father’s Turkish-German phrasebook. According to the Wikipedia entry on the publisher, Meyers Bibliographisches Institut published German language phrasebooks from the 19th to early 20th century. The phrasebook I have is embossed with Vitali’s initials.
Genealogists and family historians all recommend periodically searching for answers to unanswered questions. More information and documents are being digitized every day.