Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Camp survivor Sam Gottesman, 83, of the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, in front of a mural at the Holocaust Center in Squirrel Hill. "As far as our lives are concerned, it's not going to make much of a difference."

By Michael Birnbaum
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Anne Frank's files are there, and so is the list of people saved by Oskar Schindler. Some files record the prisoners' head lice. Some even record the size of each louse. Even grimmer, some files are just handwritten lists of people who were murdered. They go on for pages at a time.

But until now, those files, which were collected by the Red Cross from concentration camps, hospitals and other parts of the Nazi regime after World War II and stretch out over 17 miles of shelves in the tiny German town of Bad Arolsen, have been nearly impossible to access.

Requests from historians were turned away, and requests from survivors and their descendants would go unanswered for years. As of 2006 there was a backlog of 425,000 requests from survivors and their families; while that number has been reduced, it's still substantial. As survivors reach the end of their lives, time is more and more of the essence.

"How anyone can morally justify keeping this archive closed," said Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Museum, "I don't know."

Now, Bad Arolsen has opened its doors to survivors. Digital copies of the archive will be circulated around the world, and one of the copies will be made available at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., later this year or early in 2008.

It's a change that will affect survivors across the world.

"I know where my family died -- Belzec -- but I want to know more details," said Jack Sittsamer, president of the Pittsburgh Holocaust Survivors Organization. "My brother and I were separated. I'd like to know where he went and where he died.

Ralph Orlowski, Getty Images An employee of the International Tracing Service researches documents at the Holocaust Archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Click photo for larger image. Related Coverage: Learning German to unlock the truth

"When I got liberated, I wrote a letter to the Red Cross," Mr. Sittsamer said. "I had to wait eight years to get an answer from them. And it was nothing."

Survivors like Mr. Sittsamer are exactly the type of people the archive will benefit. Those 17 miles of files include records of deportations, imprisonments, slave labor assignments and of the displaced person camps that were established after the war.

Waiting years for a response

The International Tracing Service, which runs the archive, was originally conceived as an organization to help family members who had survived the war and to inform them of others who had not.

But for years, survivors and their families have criticized the archive as unresponsive to their requests. Many have gone unfulfilled; sometimes, responses have been inaccurate or incomplete, as was the case for Mr. Sittsamer.

"People would finally get information after waiting for years, and it wouldn't even be correct!" said Ms. Bloomfield, of the Holocaust Museum.

Any modification to the archives requires unanimous consent from the 11 countries that run it. Sometimes that consent takes a long time. The agreement to open the archives was finally signed in May 2006, but only nine of the 11 member countries have ratified the changes. France and Italy now remain, and are expected to ratify it by the end of the year.

France's ratification has been delayed by the presidential and legislative elections, but "we expect to be done as soon as possible," said Agnes Vondermuhll, a spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington.

As for Italy, "the treaty is in the primordial stages," said Luca Ferrari, spokesman of the Italian Embassy. "Our process of ratifying treaties, bureaucratically, is one or two years." Mr. Ferrari expects that this treaty will be given special treatment.

But it may be too little, too late.

"In a year, they're going to have a lot less [survivors] than they have today," said Sam Gottesman, a concentration camp survivor and Squirrel Hill resident. "As far as our lives are concerned, it's not going to make much of a difference."

Some survivors are also disappointed with the U.S. Holocaust Museum's decision not to make the archive available for search on the Internet.

"It should be open-book -- you shouldn't have to go to any organization to get it," said Mr. Sittsamer.

There are several barriers to putting the collection online. One is the sheer size of the archive and the status of its digitization. Having a digital copy isn't the same as having a searchable copy, Ms. Bloomfield said.

"It's as if we took digital photographs of your photo album, but there was no context or content for what it was," she said. "There are 100 million pictures," but few captions.

Difficulties in going online

The International Tracing Service itself says that less than 40 percent of its collection has been indexed in its computer database, even though 70 percent of the archive has been scanned. Maria Raabe, a spokeswoman for the archive, said that the portion of the archive that contains concentration camp records is mostly searchable via computer -- a name typed into a specialized search engine turns up digital images of the files. But many other records have yet to be incorporated in the computerized database, Ms. Raabe said. Employees still have to turn to the physical files to fulfill these requests.

It's also not clear that under the treaty, putting the archives online would even be legal.

"I think the answer right now is no," said Christian Kennedy, the American diplomat who negotiated the treaty. The terms of the agreement state that "Each Government may make these archives and documents accessible for research on the premises of an appropriate archival repository in its territory." In plain terms, that suggests that the United States can allow people to search records only at the Holocaust Museum itself. Although survivors could send requests to the museum, they wouldn't be able to search for records directly.

"European governments are very sensitive to privacy concerns," said Mr. Kennedy. "This was the best deal we could get for survivors to have access to their documents during their lifetime."

Once the United States has a copy, negotiations about the Internet might begin.

"The idea was to get something under control of American law to be something of service to the survivors," Mr. Kennedy said.

It's a race against time. The United States recently asked for the treaty to be amended so that the museum could start preparing the archive for access even before the remaining member states ratify the treaty. All the countries agreed to the amendment, but the Holocaust Museum still hasn't received the initial portions of the archive.

Once it does, it can begin the work of making the files quickly accessible for when the treaty gains force. Current plans are to allow survivors to request information by mail, over the Internet and by phone -- the museum will even have a special hot line. Once requests are received, archivists at the museum will call up records and send photocopies, free of charge, to the survivors and their families.

Visitors to the museum will be able to access the entire archives via computer -- theoretically.

"Every document will be able to be viewed on a computer terminal, but finding [the document] is the challenge," said Andrew Hollinger, a spokesperson for the museum. Even though each document will be available in digital form, only a small portion of the documents will actually be searchable, at least at the beginning. It's just as though one had the archive in paper form, with no quick way to call up files via a keyword.

The Holocaust Museum will be satisfied with whatever form of the archive it gets, just as long as it happens soon.

"We're sending a whole team of people to get a sense of how the archive works," said Ms. Bloomfield. That way, the museum can fulfill requests from survivors as quickly as possible.

"In the short term, our priority is to get these things accessible, online or off it," Ms. Bloomfield said.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published July 17, 2007) The name of Jack Sittsamer, president of the Pittsburgh Holocaust Survivors Organization, was misspelled in this article as originally published July 15, 2007 about the Holocaust archive that is opening to the public.