How Many People Survived The Holocaust

Search for displaced Holocaust kids seen in photos

There are girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in short pants or wool jackets (one even wears a discarded Hitler Youth uniform). There are teens and toddlers. There are kids who look happy, sad, scared, tense and relieved — greatly relieved.

There are few hints in the photos, aside from some weary eyes or bony arms, of the hardships they endured to get to this moment: hiding in strangers' homes, stealing scraps of bread to survive, gasping for air in cramped cattle cars.

These are children who'd come through the fire, survivors of the Holocaust photographed by social service agencies across Europe soon after World War II. There are more than 1,100 pictures, long stashed away and forgotten in the mists of history.

Until now.

More than 65 years later, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reaching out around the world to find the people in these extraordinary photos. It has posted the pictures online and spread the word that the search is on.

The plan is to preserve their stories, fill in some gaps of history — and then have them step before the camera once again.

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Theodore Meicler recognized his 8-year-old self immediately: the thatch of dark brown hair, the unsmiling eyes, the distant look that concealed his sorrow. He had never seen the post-war photo — but one glance resurrected the pain.

"It brought me back to a time where I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know where I was going or who was going to feed me tomorrow," he says. "It definitely made me very sad for the loss ... and very angry for the damage that was done to me."

Meicler was just 4 years old when his father was arrested. He still remembers the coats the Gestapo agents wore when they took his dad away, and the dark bread his mother packed for him before saying goodbye.

For half the war, the young Theo hid in his native Belgium, shuttling from place to place: A farm. A mansion. A Jesuit school. The home of a family friend.

His mother and younger brother had taken refuge separately in other homes. They reunited when the war ended. By then, his father had died in Auschwitz.

In the decades that followed, Meicler built a life, first in Israel, then in America. He married twice, had three children, bought an upholstery company in Texas and is now retired.

He was surprised to receive an email from the Holocaust museum this spring, asking two questions: Was he the boy in the attached photo? If so, would he share his story?

Metro: Last Light preview [360/PS3/PC/WU] – Gamers Paradise

You must have had one of those moments where a videogame feels like more than just a game? I don’t mean you literally start to believe it’s real, or anything equally daft; that way lies terrible slasher movies and certain embarrassing plot twists in ancient classics. But certain games pile on the atmosphere so well I get transported, if you like, my head full of the little details the developers have dotted around the world to the point I wish I could go there.

4A’s post-apocalyptic shooter Metro 2033 was one such game. It was adapted from the first in a hugely successful series of novels published in Russia that described life in the near future after the bombs have dropped, where the people who survived the nuclear holocaust escaped into the abandoned metro system beneath Moscow (which actually exists, and it’s almost as terrifying in real life). Only they discover they’re not alone.

What made it so immersive? Well, developers 4A Games was formed by staff who’d worked on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles, so they were already familiar with turning sprawling Russian novels into videogames that were as unforgiving as a floor strewn with rusty nails. Metro 2033 wasn’t quite as bewilderingly detailed as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, and your character not quite so helpless, but its take on the apocalypse was just as frightening as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s empty, radiation-blasted landscape.

Everything felt important in Metro 2033, like it had a reason to be there. Your weapons looked scuffed and weatherbeaten, as if they’d been repaired multiple times, and some were even bolted together out of spare parts. Your torch needed to be hand-cranked. Your ammunition was in short supply, and the good stuff – the heavy-calibre rounds – did double duty as cash, meaning you had to be extra careful with it.

When you travelled above ground, you needed a gasmask, and as well as needing to keep a constant eye on your remaining filters any damage you took would crack your faceplate. If your mask went altogether and you had no replacement handy, that was it. All this made for a feverish, desperate quality to the combat, where you knew if you spent too much time taking out enemies or wasted too many bullets you’d just made things that much worse for yourself.

But Metro 2033 was a world where the downtime was just as important as the firefights. There were countless little vignettes everywhere you looked explaining how this particular post-apocalyptic society functioned; you saw people at work, raising livestock, running the communal kitchens, the marketplaces or the checkpoints; you saw into their rooms, where they were catching a few hours’ restless sleep or listening to music from a forgotten past; you saw soldiers swapping war stories at the bar, and civilians desperate for news from the front.

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Kliatt young adult paperback book guide