The Blogs: I Found My Husband’s Grandfather in the Holocaust Archives. I Was Wrong.

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.

It feels like proof.

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.

Flossenbürg.

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 was wrong.

I had also misread part of the Nazi record. I interpreted November 28, 1944 as a date of death. It was an intake or registration date. The document was not recording a death at all.

I had made two errors: I had misread the document and, more fundamentally, identified the man in it as my husband’s grandfather.

A Flossenbürg personal-effects record for Abraham Szurek, prisoner no. 38542. The entry dated November 28, 1944 records his admission or registration. I initially misread the date as a date of death. (Arolsen Archives)

The question that changed everything

The contradiction emerged when I tried to document Shlomo’s path.

The family already knew that Shlomo had survived and was liberated at Buchenwald. I also had his Buchenwald prisoner card, and this record contained an identifying detail that led directly back to Edna’s family: it named him as Szlama Szurek, born in Warsaw in 1924, and gave his address as ul. Miła 18, the Szurek family home.

I knew I had the right Shlomo.

Shlomo (Szlama) Szurek’s Buchenwald prisoner card. It records his birthplace as Warsaw, his address as ul. Miła 18, and his admission to Buchenwald on January 17, 1945. (Arolsen Archives)

That created a problem I could no longer ignore.

If Shlomo had been with his father when Avraham died, and if Avraham had died at Flossenbürg as I had concluded, where were Shlomo’s Flossenbürg records?

I wrote to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial to find them.

I expected another piece of the puzzle.

Instead, their answer dismantled the picture I had assembled.

According to the Memorial’s research, Szlama Szurek was not registered at Flossenbürg or any of its subcamps. Their records pointed instead to Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.

But what they found about Abraham was even more consequential.

The Abraham Szurek in the Flossenbürg records was from Łódź and had been transferred from Stutthof to Dresden-Bernsdorf, a Flossenbürg subcamp.

And he had not died there.

According to the Memorial’s data sheet, he survived the war and was liberated at Terezín on May 8, 1945.

Our Avraham belonged to a Warsaw family. According to the testimony of his children, he had died during the war.

The contrast was impossible to miss. Shlomo’s Buchenwald record led directly back to 18 Miła Street in Warsaw. The Abraham Szurek I had followed through the Flossenbürg records led back to Łódź.

I had the right Shlomo.

I had the wrong Avraham.

The Memorial cautioned that the inconsistencies made the identification doubtful, especially in Abraham’s case.

That was the moment the reconstruction collapsed.

The Nazi document was real. The prisoner was real. I had simply attached the wrong family to him.

I thought I had found my husband’s grandfather’s death. Instead, I had followed another Abraham Szurek, a man from Łódź who survived.

The Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial data sheet that clarified the identification. It records an Abraham Szurek from Łódź, prisoner no. 38542, who survived and was liberated at Terezín on May 8, 1945. (KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg)

Going back to the beginning

I returned to the records, Yakov’s testimony and what Edna had told Sam.

And I stopped asking how the family testimony could fit Flossenbürg. Instead, I asked where the testimony itself led.

The answer was Majdanek.

Yakov’s account placed Avraham and Shlomo together much earlier. Father and son had gone to Lublin and were sent as laborers to help build Majdanek, under the promise of work and safety.

Avraham died there.

And Edna had told Sam what happened next. Her brother Shlomo had been with their father. She told Sam repeatedly that Shlomo was forced to put their father’s body into the oven.

Not something she mentioned once and let go. Something she returned to. Something she made sure her son knew.

There is no document I have found recording that moment. There may never be one.

Instead, two strands of family testimony converge. Yakov places father and son together in the labor detail connected to Majdanek. Edna’s account, repeated to her son, places Shlomo with their father at his death and describes what he was forced to do afterward.

And suddenly the absence that had started this entire reexamination made sense.

There was no Shlomo at Flossenbürg because I had been looking for him in the wrong place.

What happened to Shlomo

The family testimony does not identify Shlomo as a member of a unit formally called the Sonderkommando. It describes forced crematorium work: handling and disposing of the dead.

Neither Yakov nor Edna used that historical terminology. Edna remembered something far more specific.

Her brother was forced to put his own father’s body into the oven.

Shlomo did not choose this. He was a young forced laborer in the same camp as his father. When Avraham died, the camp forced his son to participate in disposing of his body.

The family knew Shlomo survived and was liberated at Buchenwald. His surviving documentation places him there, while the Flossenbürg Memorial’s research also points to Mittelbau-Dora.

After the war, he settled in Israel, married and had children. But survival was not the end of what happened to him. He carried the memory of what he had been forced to do. He descended into alcoholism. In 1977, at the age of 53, he was found dead on a street in Israel.

That is not a footnote to this story. It is the story.

The Holocaust did not only kill. It forced people into circumstances no human being should endure and left survivors to carry what had been done to them.

The authority of a piece of paper

Paper feels objective.

A prisoner record has a number. A date. A camp. A name typed into a box. It carries the authority of an archive.

A survivor’s memory is different. It may be carried for decades before being recorded. Dates blur. Places can become confused. Trauma does not preserve experience in neat chronology.

As a researcher, you want corroboration. I certainly did.

But the document never said: This is Edna Szurek’s father.

I said that.

The record was real. So was the man whose life it documented. My error was assuming that man was ours.

Archives are indispensable. Documents restore names, dates and journeys to people the Nazis tried to erase.

But documents have limits, especially when identifying one person among millions displaced, imprisoned and murdered.

Survivor testimony has limits too. Memory can be imperfect.

The answer is not to choose testimony over documents or documents over testimony.

It is to interrogate both: ask what each source actually proves, notice when evidence that should intersect does not, and distinguish evidence from inference.

And when the evidence no longer supports the story you have published, to say so.

The correction

That is what I am doing now.

I believed I had found Avraham Szurek in the Flossenbürg records. Combined with the family’s knowledge that Shlomo was present at his father’s death, they seemed to solve a decades-old mystery.

They did not.

I had taken pieces of genuine evidence and connected them incorrectly.

There really was an Abraham Szurek in those records. And Edna really did tell her son that Shlomo had been forced to put their father’s body into the oven.

My mistake was placing those two histories in the same camp.

When I followed the contradiction back through the evidence, our family’s story led somewhere else.

To Majdanek.

To a father and son sent away together under the promise of labor. To a father who died there.

And to a son forced to do something almost impossible to comprehend: place his own father’s body into the cremation oven.

I cannot produce the document that records that moment. Perhaps no such document ever existed.

But absence from an archive is not the same thing as absence from history.

I owe Avraham the truest story I can tell, even the parts that will never fit neatly into an archive.

And I owe anyone doing this work a warning: the first record you find does not always tell the truth you think it does.

Sometimes what survives on paper is only part of the history.

And sometimes the rest survives in what the people who were there carried, and told, and never wrote down.

Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Order Now.