Researching a family destroyed in the Holocaust can be harrowing. It can also, I have learned the hard way, be misleading.

You go looking for your husband’s grandfather, a man erased so completely that no photograph of him survives, and you find a document.

A name on a Nazi record. A prisoner number. A date. The chronology seems possible. The record appears to fill a hole in the family history.

For years, I believed I had found the Nazi documentary record of my husband’s grandfather, Avraham Szurek.

The records were genuine. The man was real.

He just wasn’t our Avraham.

And because I did not know that, the reconstruction I made is now in print.

The document that seemed to answer everything

When I was researching Little Edna’s War, the story of my mother-in-law, Edna Szurek Brill, there were enormous holes in her family history.

Edna survived the Warsaw Ghetto, passed as a Catholic orphan, fought in the Warsaw Uprising and survived German prisoner-of-war camps. Reconstructing what happened to her family meant piecing together testimony, memory and scattered archives.

One of the greatest mysteries was the fate of her father, Avraham.

In 1941, Avraham and his eldest son, Shlomo, went together to Lublin for a Nazi work assignment, believing that volunteering for labor might help protect the family. Yakov, another of Avraham’s sons, later testified that they were sent to work building Majdanek.

Edna told her son, my husband Sam, repeatedly over the years that Shlomo had been with their father when Avraham died and that Shlomo had been forced to put his father’s body into the cremation oven.

Then I found what appeared to be the answer.

In the Arolsen Archives was a Nazi concentration camp file for SZUREK, ABRAHAM, born January 15, 1902. I had no surviving document establishing my husband’s grandfather’s date of birth. But the name was right, the age plausible, and the record appeared to offer something we had never had: a documentary trail for Avraham through the Nazi camp system.

I believed I had found him.

Suddenly two different kinds of evidence seemed to fit together. The family testimony told me what had happened: Shlomo had been with his father when Avraham died and had been forced to place his body into the oven. The Nazi records appeared to tell me where.

I put the pieces together. In an earlier blog post and later in the epilogue of Little Edna’s War, I wrote that Avraham’s journey had ended at Flossenbürg and that Shlomo, working in the crematorium there, had been forced to place his father’s body into the oven.

I had also misread part of........

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