The American Red Cross has opened a Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center in Baltimore.
The center, at the local Red Cross office in northwest Baltimore, will provide access to documents bearing the names of about 400,000 people who died or were interned in Nazi concentration and forced labor camps during World War II.
Copies of the documents have been made available by the Soviet Union to a Red Cross agency in West Germany. The Soviet army recovered the original documents during the
liberation of the camps at war's end.
People who want to learn the fates of friends and relatives who perished or were held in the camps can apply immediately to the Baltimore center for information, said Linda Klein, media manager for the Central Maryland Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Emmy Mogilensky of Pikesville knows the value of the documents. From 1942 to 1946, Mogilensky, a German-Jewish teen-ager, searched for her parents from whom she was separated in the early days of World War II when she was shipped to England.
Her search ended in June 1946 when the Red Cross told her that her parents had died in a concentration camp.
With the documents made available by the Soviet Union, the search may end for thousands like Mogilensky.
Throughout the United States, applicants can complete inquiry forms at local Red Cross offices. The requests will be sent to the Baltimore center, where workers will translate them into German and forward them to the International Tracing Service, the Red Cross agency in Arolsen, West Germany, where the copies of the documents are being stored.
Baltimore was chosen as the site of the center as the result of talks between local Red Cross executive director Patrick Morand and American Red Cross international services director Jose Aponte, Klein explained.
"When Mr. Morand learned that such a center would open in the United States, he asked about getting it for Baltimore," Klein said. "After all, we have so many Jewish people and people of Eastern European descent here. Mr. Aponte was happy to oblige, since his office in Washington was being overwhelmed ++ tracing names of Vietnamese and Cambodians who died or disappeared in wars in those countries."
Morand, Aponte and other Red Cross officials announced the opening of the center during a news conference yesterday at the local Red Cross office at 4700 Mount Hope Drive, in the Seton Business Park.
