Tracing the Tracing Requests Addressed to the Committee for Relief of the War-Stricken Jewish Population (RELICO)

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

During the Second World War, thousands of Jewish refugees, scattered across the globe, penned letters to the Committee for Relief of the War-Stricken Jewish Population, known as RELICO, in an attempt to locate their family members remaining in continental Europe. Today housed in the archive of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, these tracing requests form the backbone of the collection and remain largely unstudied. This article demonstrates how a microhistory approach to a specific archival collection reveals the human side of tracing. It uses a semi-randomised selection of four enquiry letters to reconstruct the biographies of these individuals and families. By focusing on these personal details, it tells a history that humanises otherwise mass narratives of migration, persecution, and tracing practices during the Holocaust.