Who Am I? What is My Name? Part V – Gertrude and Sonia’s Escape
Gertrude & Sonia Preiss-Spiro’s names are listed on the transport to Auschwitz of 141 women from Pawiak prison in Warsaw on 24 August 1943. Pawiak prison was originally used by the Polish judicial to incarcerate criminals, but after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, it was converted into a German Gestapo prison. Approximately 100,000 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
DNA Rule-Out for Cold Case, Australia, 1970 – Part I
A crime that could not escape media attention in Australia, any more than the Manson family murders could have evaded the public eye here in the States-Elmer Crawford brutally murdered his pregnant wife Theresa (35) and his three children Kathryn (13), James (8), and Karen (6) in 1970. He then disappeared. Elmer electrocuted his family while they slept using an electrical cable he had […]
Unknown Child on the Titanic – Part IV (Conclusion)
When AFDIL attempted an identification through Y-DNA, I was asked by my colleague Dr. Odile Loreille to find a Y-DNA reference for Sidney Goodwin. We were just finishing up the identification of The Hand in the Snow, so she knew I was available for a new project. Of course, my first step was to search Ancestry.com to obtain information about the […]
Unknown Child on the Titanic – Part III
To understand what happened next, you have to know a little about mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Mitochondrial DNA is contained in small, football-shaped inclusions outside the nucleus of a cell. It’s widely believed that mitochondria were once independent bacteria that invaded primitive cells millions of years ago. Instead of being digested, these bacteria took up residence […]