Since she started her work, Patricia Wilson, 72, has engineered more than 50 reunions between Holocaust survivors and has brought families from around the world together. Yael and Alef were just one example.
The reunion came about when Wilson saw a message online posted through an intermediary that a Dutch family were looking for Yael. Having already done a search for another Dutch woman living in Israel, Wilson called her initial contact, who was living in a retirement home in Haifa, and asked if she could put Yael’s name on the home’s noticeboard.
“Five minutes later, I had a call from someone saying: ‘I know this woman, she lives in Haifa,’” says Wilson. She called Yael, who passed Wilson on to her carer, who then put her in touch with Yael’s daughter. She had achieved in a few minutes, something that Alef had tried to do for 13 years.
Within a week, Alef Dijkstra came to Israel with his wife Pietje. At this emotional reunion, they met Yael, already in her late eighties, along with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A year later, Dirk and Maartje Dijkstra, Alef’s late parents, were posthumously recognised as Righteous Among The Nations at a moving ceremony at Yad Vashem.
After Yael left the Dijkstras’ home, she had gone to France where she worked for the Underground smuggling people to safety over the Pyrénées to Spain.
This heroic work was something she had never mentioned to anyone, even her own children.
The Dijkstras later organised and paid for a memorial plaque to commemorate Yael’s wartime heroism, which was put up in the local church in Sint Jacobiparochie, the small village in Friesland, in the north of The Netherlands where she had been hidden by the family. Yael’s children attended the unveiling ceremony of the plaque in 2014, alongside the entire Dijkstra family. Yael died the same year at the age of 90.
Wilson, who lives in Ra’anana, made aliyah in 1993 with her husband and three children. She stumbled into genealogy after her father died. She came back to London to clear out his house and discovered a suitcase in his loft stuffed full of hundreds of old family photos, some dating back to early 1900s.
Curiosity led her to investigate who these mysterious relatives were. It was the late 1990s, when the Internet was just starting to take off, and she started looking up names online. She discovered unknown siblings of her grandparents and multiple descendants dotted around the world.
“It was unbelievable what I found,” says Wilson. She unearthed so many new cousins that she decided to take a trip with her husband to America to meet them. “We travelled across the whole country, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and had a big reunion in Las Vegas.”
This journey into discovering her own family history led to friends asking if Wilson could help with their own family trees. Through word of mouth, she started getting more and more requests for help, and soon became hooked on the work. Eventually, she decided what her niche would be.
“There are so many Holocaust survivors who want to find
their long-lost relatives. I said
if I can help ordinary people
find their relatives, then why don’t I concentrate on helping Holocaust survivors?”
Then Yad Vashem put its Pages of Testimony online, making information easily accessible about millions of Holocaust victims and survivors. “My whole thing is the Holocaust; it really touches my heart. I think the most heartbreaking thing is when I find people; to see them putting their arms around each other after 60 years and cry and cry for all those wasted years.”
One of her earliest discoveries for a Holocaust survivor was through a friend whose father came to see her. As a boy of about 13 or 14 in Poland during the War, he had wanted to join the Partisans, but his father insisted on going with him to the initial meeting. They were gone from their shtetl for a few hours, and on their return, struck by how silent it was, discovered that everyone had gone.
The father and son duo ended up joining the Partisans together and surviving the war, moving to Canada once it was over. On this particular visit to see his daughter in Israel, the son — now an old man — asked Wilson if she could find out anything about his lost family.
Wilson quickly got to work scouring the Yad Vashem records. She found out the day his mother and siblings had been taken away and the day they had been killed.
She describes movingly how this news was received: “My friend’s father sobbed and sobbed, but he said: ‘I’m not crying because of what happened. I’m crying because I now have a Yahrzeit date to say Kaddish for them.’”
He returned to Canada, and Wilson’s friend described her father as a changed man. “It was like a weight had been lifted from him. It was a sense of closure for him.
“This is what people want; a sense of closure.”
Wilson is modest about her achievements to date. “I do not call myself a professional researcher. I do not go to archives; I don’t leave my home,” she says. However, it is clear she puts endless hours and dedication into her work, which she refers to as her “calling”.
With a network of contacts she has built up across the world over the years— and the wealth of information now available online, Wilson says she can usually tell people “within one hour” if she can help them. She charges a modest hourly rate for her work, but never takes any money from Holocaust survivors.
In the past few years, more and more archives have been digitalised, making her work easier. Most recently, for example, the International Tracing Service (now the Arolsen Archives) has been put online. This archive contains millions of Nazi records giving details of Holocaust victims, including dates of deportation and death.
Another story Wilson recounts involves Holocaust survivor, Chave Margules whose contacts posted on an online forum asking for help.
Chave had been searching unsuccessfully for many years for the identity of her biological family in Poland.
As a child, she had been thrust into the arms of a non-Jewish girl by her mother who had managed to run out of the Srodula ghetto. The only clue she had to her own identity was a name tag her mother had sewn into her clothing.
The Polish family hid Chave until the end of the war, but did not want to return her to the Jewish authorities afterwards. The mother of the family insisted that she would only return the child to the woman who had entrusted her to their care.
Chave was secretly taken one night by members of a branch of Agudath Yisrael, who bribed a maid to leave a window open, and Chave was handed to a Jewish orphanage in France, where she was treated with love and care.
She was subsequently adopted by an American couple and went to live in New York, where she married a rabbi and had six children before moving to Israel with her family. She worked for decades as a nurse in Jerusalem hospitals.
She started searching for her roots only after her beloved adoptive parents died. Wilson’s research meant she was able to provide Chave with her birth record in 1942 in Sosnowiec, Poland and her parents’ full names — Abram Margules, born 1904 in Sosnowiec, and Leja Sara Guterman, born 1915 in Dabrowa Gornicza — as well as their marriage record in 1932.
She helped Chave draw up a family tree going back some generations, but in conjunction with her researcher colleagues, is still trying to search for records of what happened to Chave’s parents or siblings during the War.
Wilson remains in close contact with Chave, who is now 77 and living in Jerusalem. She feel strongly that the part she played in helping Chave discover her identity has been “the greatest mitzvah in my life.”
“Our team worked hard together to get the results we did — answering that initial posting changed not only my life but those of Chave, her husband and her children,” says Wilson.
As for her own family history, Patricia Wilson says it’s still “a work in progress”.
She has managed to trace one branch of the family back to 1830. Who knows how many more generations she will dig up?
To contact Patricia Wilson about Chave or your own family history email: wilsonettess@yahoo.com
