Every year on Yom HaShoah people gather to remember the victims. Among them will be some survivors, each year fewer and fewer. he blurred lines of a serial number on a forearm are the image of the Holocaust. The tattoos of the survivors symbolize the brutality of the concentration camps. No official document identifies the people who were subjected to having these numbers tattooed on their arms. Gabriella Y. Karin, a sculptor and Holocaust survivor, began the Auschwitz Tattoo Numbers Photography Project to create a visual catalog that identifies the survivors of Auschwitz. This project is trying to make a visual documentation of this barbaric happening. Please help assemble information about as many people as can be reached.

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Have you registered for the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy yet? It’s not too late! The conference will take place in Los Angeles, California from 11–16 July and promises to be one of the most comprehensive and entertaining genealogical events in recent memory. More than 300 lectures and 50 films, plus workshops, computer labs, theatrical performances, and more from early morning until late evening. Many programs will be geared toward Galician, Polish, and Ukrainian researchers. All kinds of lectures on methods. Incredible opportunities to further your Holocaust research. Constant opportunities to network with landsleit from other Galician shtetlach and towns. For program details go to http://www.JGSLA2010.com/ and click on the Programs tab.

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If it is axiomatic that you only experience your grandparents in their senior years, then how can you know who and what they were in their youth? For those with great family continuity, taking stock of them in their early years is comparatively easy—just look at your parents or your own early life and extrapolate back in time. But what could I do? My grandparents were immigrants from a place with strange traditions, different languages, and an opaque history. Comparisons rang hollow and my experience was worthless because there just wasn’t anything analogous between my youth in Vietnam-era America and Belle Epoque Imperial Austrian Galicia, where they spent their formative years.

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