AP Wire | 12/11/2005 | Online Holocaust databases aid search for history

Malka Shaham knew little about how her parents had survived the Holocaust. They didn't talk about it as she was growing up, and she didn't ask many questions. But when she began taking care of her ailing father at her home in Israel's Negev desert during the final years of his life - when he no longer had full control of his words and thoughts - he began speaking of the Holocaust for the first time. Sometimes the revelations came during nightmares. (...) Shaham, 54, decided to try to find out everything she could about what her parents, David and Frieda Fogel, had endured in Poland during World War II. She found clues in an online database of survivors and victims of the genocide of approximately 6 million Jews, compiled by a Wittenberg University professor in this western Ohio city. Such databases are becoming increasingly popular as they go online. Children and grandchildren of aging Holocaust survivors try to find long-lost relatives and fill in family history made hazy by missing records, faded memories and the fear of survivors that they will relive the horror by talking about it. (...) The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem has about 12 million Holocaust-era records, primarily about those who perished. Since the material was put online in November 2004, more than 6 million people from nearly every country in the world have used the database.