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Pinkas HaNitzolim - Volume I, published in Jerusalem in 1945, contains 166 different lists of Jewish survivors rescued in various European countries.  These lists are each described in the table at the bottom of this file.

INTRODUCTION - by Ada Holtzman

After completing the computerization of Pinkas Hanitzolim II, I volunteered to coordinate the second most important project of computerizing the Pinkas Hanitzolim I: Register of Jewish Survivors Lists of Jews Rescued in Different European Countries, published by The Jewish Agency, Jerusalem 1945.

My relation to this Registers of Survivors published by the Jewish Agency (“Suchnut”) right after the Holocaust in 1945, is explained in my Introduction to the database compiled from Pinkas Hanitzolim II. I was very pleased that JewishGen managed to put this most precious database online, available to the whole Jewish world, but I felt that the first volume of the Register should also be on the Internet. Before computerizing the first volume it was extremely difficult to search a survivor in this register, because it was made from various lists and sub-lists (166) and one had to review them all in order to search for a name. So even if you had the book (which is very rare now), one could not use it efficiently. All this is solved now.

I got the initial scanned file from Yad Vashem and I sent the various lists to seven dear volunteers all around the globe, who did the necessary proofreading. JewishGen, Yad Vashem and myself are very grateful to these volunteers and extend our sincere thanks to them. Without their dedicated work on the lists, the project couldn’t have been materialized. One volunteer phoned me after finishing her part and told me that she was proud to be chosen to work in this important project... And I am proud to have these dedicated volunteers who also work for JewishGen and Yad Vashem in other various projects. The volunteers whom we all thank very much were: Alex P. Korn from Canada, David Amdurer from U.K., Morris Wirth and Sandra Krisch from U.S.A. and Asher Jung, Erica Marom, Shmuel Kehati and myself from Israel.

There is a very popular radio program in Israel “Kol Israel Reshet Bet”: “Hamador Lechipus Krovim” (“Searching Relatives Bureau”) which is broadcast every day. One of those days recently, in one of the programs, I heard the voice of an old man, sounds in his 80s, stating solemnly that he is looking for …his mother… After her name, he recited other 47 names, all close relatives of him, all perished eventually in the Holocaust but the old man has still a hope... Because the hope also survives and only when he dies, the hope dies with him... (Halina Birenbaum "Hope is the Last to Die").

Each name is the whole world! In this volume they all come to you, the survivors of Buchenwald, the women survived in Bergen-Belsen, the inmates of Dachau, the refugees in Sweden, the Jews surviving in Theresienstadt, the remnants of the grand European Jewry... Through each individual story, you can learn about the Jewish People and their tragic history in the last century. One special survivor shone to me in bright light: Primo Levi, Torino, list nr. 32 "Jewish Survivors in Some Italian Cities - Milan - 32I", page 270, the survivor of Auschwitz, writer of the unforgettable book: "Se questo e un uomo". He is one name, one world, out of 61,697 names, 61,697 worlds, recorded in the Survivors Register...

The first Volume of the register ("Pinkas I") is much more complex than the second one, and many of the various lists contain much more genealogical details than Pinkas II, such as current residence, year of birth, age, father’s name, occupation, previous residence, and more. It was very difficult to compile the original book, as written in the book’s own introduction. Now imagine the difficulties I faced when all those lists had to be converted into one comprehensive database. I needed minimum knowledge of Hungarian, Dutch and Czech Jewish Genealogy, which I didn’t have. Through help of various people from JewishGen SIGs I managed to acquire that basic knowledge.

I would like to review some of the technical problems and how we solved them.

• The umlaut was replaced with the vowel + "e", in all the lists, by Yad Vashem. We tried to avoid this extra "e" when possible, but not all the volunteers followed that rule. The reason for this decision is that most of the names nowadays have no umlaut and no additional "e" when it is written in the English language.
• Another problem was the second name in comparison to maiden name. We classified a second name under "maiden name" when it was in parenthesis. When there were no parenthesis, we classified the name as a second alternate surname, which is displayed in the Name column following a slash ("/").
• Sometimes a person had three surnames. In this case we inserted all surnames in the Name column, separated by slashes. We practiced the same rule also when a person had three given names. The 2nd and 3rd given names are displayed in the Name column, each separated by a slash ("/")". All surnames remain searchable in the JewishGen search engine.
• When a father had two names we inserted both, in the Comments column, under "Father Name".
• Years of birth were specified in the book using two-digit years. The difference between the age and year of birth was that when a number appears following by "y" or "years" or "yrs" we put it under age, otherwise it was the last two digits of the year of birth.
• When it was specified clearly in the explanation of the list that the place in the list is former residence we classified the place under "Former Residence or Birth Place", as in lists 5, 6, 21 and 25.
• Husband's name appears mostly in entries of Jewish women of Hungarian and Transylvania origins. The name of the husband appears in the original lists with the suffix "ne'".
• When a survivor was registered with another member of the family ("& son", "with wife", etc., we added the name of the family member to the database if he/she had a name. If there was no name, the details were left as they are in the book and put under the field "Notes".
• We added to each entry its page number in the Register, as a reference. We also numbered the entries, just to keep the original order of the entries in the Register.

I wish to stress once again the fact that we had a huge and difficult task to convert 166 various lists into a one comprehensive unified searchable database and overcome other various technical problems. Our rule was to be as much faithful to the written lists as possible. Unfortunately we don't have more details than those published in the database.

I wish to extend my thanks and appreciation to Joyce Field, JewishGen Research Director for her constant help, dedication, persistence and vision.  I wish to thank Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias from JewishGen for their wonderful masterpiece, converting a giant database into one compact, comprehensive and simple searchable database.  My thanks are also extended to Yad Vashem for scanning the lists and giving them to JewishGen for proofreading and eventually post them in the Internet. I also thank Shalom Eitan from Israel for his help in obtaining the permission from the Jewish Agency to publish the lists on the web. Heartfelt thanks to the Jewish Agency for its agreement to post the lists and have them available to the whole Jewish world. I learned that recently the Sochnut closed their "The Search Bureau for Missing Relatives" headed by Batya Unterschatz for many years and which used the Survivor Registers as part of their main sources, but I hope it will be re-opened, because people are still searching their lost family members and the hope is the last to die...

Finally I wish to dedicate this project to all those who did not return and who are not registered in this book...

Ada Holtzman
21 April 2003

Here is the introductory text published in the original volume:

Click here for an image of a sample page from Pinkas HaNitzolim I -- Register of Jewish Survivors I.

This book contains 166 different lists, as follows: