Who Am I? What is My Name? Part IV – Wolfgang and Adele’s Eyewitness Account
Charlotte Schössow Rebhun was the oldest of four children of Emil and Margarete Schössow from Berlin. Charlotte, like her friend Gertrude Spiro, was a Christian woman who had married a Jew. Charlotte’s husband Max Rebhun had moved from Poland to Germany and settled in Berlin, probably right after WWI. Max was arrested on Kristalnacht in 1938, and sent to Poland. His wife […]
Who Am I, What is My Name? Part III – Gertrude and Sonia Spyra
A mystery within the mystery of Pnina’s identity is the fate of Gertrude Spyra and her daughter Sonia. As the parties responsible for smuggling Pnina from the Warsaw Ghetto, Gertrude and Sonia may have left behind clues about Pnina’s parents. Perhaps the Spyras wrote letters to their family members, as did their friend Charlotte Rebhun. […]
Who Am I? What is My Name? Part II – Pnina, Wolfgang, and the Warsaw Ghetto
Convinced that my surname was Rebhun, I contacted Rebhuns around the world. Though the BBC, CNN, and the international press featured my quest, I initially received no responses. Finally in March 1997, the Munich Red Cross relayed a reply from a German named Wolfgang Rebhun, who was searching for his little sister, Baschka (Barbara in […]
Who Am I, What Is My Name? Part I – Pnina, Otwoc, and the Kazcmareks
My name is Pnina Gutman. I am 70 years old. I began the search for my biological identity in April 1996. I called this project “Who am I what’s my name?” I came to Israel from Poland at the age of eight with a couple whom I thought to be my parents, Mania and Mendel […]
"The Mascot" – Truth or Fiction
The Mascot is the international best-selling Holocaust biography of Alex Kurzem…After an exhaustive international three-year search for evidence, my colleague Dr. Barry Resnick and I have discovered no proof that Mr. Kurzem’s story is true, nor has it been established that he is Jewish.
Identifinders International Announces DNA Study for Child Survivors of the Holocaust
Identifinders International, in collaboration with 23andMe and Missing-Identity.net, announces a pilot study to help child survivors of the Holocaust to recover their birth identities. It is hoped that autosomal DNA testing will allow these survivors to discover family connections that would otherwise be gone forever. Of the 1,600,000 Jewish children who lived in Europe before World War II, […]
The Mascot
The Mascot Keith Moor, Insight Editor at the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria recently published an article on The Mascot, the international bestselling biography of Holocaust survivor Alex Kurzem. To read the article in pdf format, click here. As Keith mentions, the foundation of the story is undeniably true. Alex was adopted by the […]
The Dead Horse Investigation – Update
The Famous Sheboygan Dead Horse Picture The man, the myth, the legend…over a century later, the questions still linger: Who is the man in the picture, and what is he doing sitting on a dead horse in the middle of the intersection of Indiana and Griffith Aves. in Sheboygan, WI? Those of you who have […]
Bonnie's New Family
Finding Bonnie’s birth father was one of our most difficult birth parent searches. Bonnie and her brother Michael knew they were born in Germany in the 1950s, but they did not know they were adopted until 2002. Although Bonnie had a copy of her birth cerificate, she had not questioned why her parents names did not appear on it, and why it was […]
DNA Rule-Out for Cold Case, Australia, 1970 – Part II
Through a casual exchange of emails a few weeks ago, Deb Cashion alerted me to a recent article “Police chase DNA of Elmer Crawford relatives in Northern Ireland” that appeared in the Herald Sun. It described the Victoria police search for a DNA family reference for Crawford. Since I was traveling in Ireland at the time, I offered to help […]