After the war ended, there was a search for survivors all over the world. One important point of contact were the offices of the tracing services and aid agencies that assisted in reunifying families. Thousands of missing-person search notices were placed in Jewish newspapers. Some survivors made their way back to their former place of residence to look for relatives. Sometimes they learned that they were the only surviving family member. Many received information about the whereabouts of their relatives or the circumstances of their death only after decades; some never did.
In 1944, Otto Frank and his family were discovered in their hiding place in Amsterdam and deported. Only Otto Frank survived in Auschwitz. On his journey back to Amsterdam he heard that his wife had been murdered in the camp. In early June of 1945, Otto Frank went to Miep and Jan Gies. The couple had once looked after him in hiding and now they took him in. Otto Frank searched intensively for his two daughters Anne and Margot. His hopes that they had survived were soon destroyed. Two survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp reported that Anne and Margot Frank had died from sickness and exhaustion only a few weeks before liberation. All Otto Frank had as remembrances were some photographs and the diaries of his daughter Anne. At first he was not able to read them; once it was published, The Diary of Anne Frank became one of the most-read books around the world.
Edgar Brichta was sent by his parents from Bratislava, Slovakia, to Norway on a Kindertransport (children’s transport) in 1939. There he survived the period of German occupation, staying with various families. Edgar Brichta hoped to be able to return home soon, and he wrote to his parents through the Red Cross—in English. He could hardly still speak his native language. The letter was returned after several weeks, marked “undeliverable.” Edgar Brichta traveled to Slovakia to search for his family, but strangers were living in his family’s house. He located a relative, but she too had heard nothing from his parents. After two years he returned to Norway. In the 1950s he emigrated to Canada.
Not until decades after the war ended did Edgar Brichta learn that he was the only survivor in his family. His parents and sister had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and presumably murdered there immediately.
During the German occupation of the Netherlands, the Dutch social worker Marion van Binsbergen helped more than 150 Jews in Amsterdam. After the war she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Germany. This relief agency maintained camps for Displaced Persons (DPs). DPs were people who had been deported from the German-occupied territories during the war. The UNRRA supported the Allied military administration in repatriating DPs. Marion van Binsbergen worked in the social welfare centers in the Föhrenwald and Windsheim DP camps. In particular, she was in charge of reuniting Jewish families.
