Do you remember when
@andrewfeinstein claimed he had lost "39 members of his family in the Holocaust"?
Did anybody think to ask him how he traced such a large number of people. It took ten years for me to trace what happened to my grandfather.
Also just not being able to find someone, doesn't mean they are dead. The Nazis moved people across boundaries. The Allies made people change their name in case they were caught. People moved across boundaries to survive, nobody stayed in one place.
How did he find 39 family members and evidence they were taken in the Holocaust, that is a huge feat. Huge.
I met a fourth cousin at a Jewish geneology workshop, she was taking it. She recognised my grandmothers surname and said we were cousins. On her computer she had my grandparents, my father and his brother and then nothing. She didn't know my uncle moved to the Netherlands to try and survive, then over the mountains to the Swiss border when it was invaded, and then returned back to the Nazis who put him in Auschwitz Poland, imagine how long it would take to try and trace all that, if you ever could.
She didn't know how my father got out of Buchenwald and escaped to England, only his uncle who escaped to Kenya was in touch with him, so how would you find that out.
She didn't know my grandfather was exterminated in Sobibor, Poland.
Just in my family alone for 3 people she would have had to research Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Kenya, England and Poland, 6 countries for 3 people.
So how do you trace 39 people and be sure they all died in the Holocaust?
On twitter I asked him how he traced so many Holocaust victims because he should run a Jewish geneology workshop and tell people how to do it, people have spent their lives, 20 and 30 years tracing one or two people and he's popped up with "39"? How clever to do that. Big Respect.
When I asked him on twitter all his mates were saying "oh she's such an antisemite, don't listen to her, so sorry Andrew, what an antisemite". Oh, is it antisemitic now to ask how someone traced "39" people from the Holocaust, found their documents to say the Nazis took them, and teach others how to do that, really, is that antisemitic. Thousands of people are still out their looking, have spent decades, and he's done it so quickly and so easily and found so many people.
I don't think we even had 39 people in our family ....
Grandparents x 4
great grandparents x 8
great great grandparents 16
great great great grandparents 11 +
Did he trace back to his great great great grandparents or did everybody have a real lot of children, and distant relatives did, see how many people you can count in your family and how far out you have to go to get to 39.
Still I insisted in knowing his technique to trace soooooo many people knowing so many would love to know how to do it, he replied, "You go to the Embassy and they give you a list".
Now ... that is not how you do it.
If it were that easy, everybody would have traced all their family members, there would be no Jewish geneology classes desperately trying to trace people.
Any Embassy doesn't know who was alive or dead, they might know some, but they don't know a family of 39, because at least some of them had crossed borders trying to escape, some had been moved across borders by the Nazis, some survived and some died. Any embassy doesn't know the clue to those answers.
This is how it works, YOU have to do the research with people in countries or going there and then take your findings to the Embassy and then ask if anybody can help you, and that usually only works with one or two people.
39 is a big number. It makes me think if someone was to pull a number out of the air would that make them more Jewish or their views more relevant, if I say I lost 45 people in the Holocaust, am I more of a Jew and my views more important than Feinstein ?
After all, have you noticed you can just print anything anywhere and claim any number of people died during the Holocaust in your family, who is going to question it.
Up until 2007 we had people tracing us through the Jewish Chronicle and turning up on our doorstep in Chelmsford, people my father hadn't seen since 1939 and assumed had perished.
On the 28th September 2010 I met my cousin a leading world geneologist in Jewish geneology specialising in German geneology, and she put me in touch with a whole party of the family that was also hers, and I rang Marianne. She was my fathers second cousin, and now lived in the USA. My father never mentioned her, my father would have assumed she was dead, I found her 13 years after my father had died.
So you see, unless you have the actual documents verifying a victim is dead, then you don't know.
Obviously I got solpersteine laid for the victims in my family I found, one imagines Feinstein has done this as well, after all you do not have to pay for the solpersteine, but if you lay one, because of you have to prove the research to get it, if you lay it, it verifies that person has been exterminated by the Nazis.
We could easily believe Feinstein really lost "39" of his family members to the Holocaust if he wants to print the photographs of laying 39 Stolpersteine, one for each one he claims has met such a tragic end. Strange he's never done that as proof.