(left) Red Cross International Services volunteer provides information about Joesph Zoller and his family to Joseph's daughters Cheryl and Martine Zoller.
When Martine Zoller, 43, was a young girl, she would ask her father, Joseph, why he had a number tattooed on his arm. Joseph jokingly told her that it was his parents’ telephone number, so if he ever got lost, he would be able to find them.
Martine and her sister, Cheryl, 49, never wrote down that number; they didn’t see a reason to do so. However, in the years following Joseph’s death in 1979, they developed an overwhelming desire to learn it. They also wanted to know more about what happened to him during the Holocaust and the fate of his parents and siblings.
In 1997, Cheryl completed an inquiry with the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, which conducts searches free-of-charge about family members missing or killed during the Holocaust. The Tracing Center utilizes the combined resources from the worldwide network of Red Cross societies, as well as museums and archives. Unfortunately, at that time, there were no records available about Joseph and his family.
Thirteen years later, new data did surface about Joseph Zoller, whose name in Poland was Josef Coller. This information was recently relayed to Red Cross L.A. Region International Services volunteer caseworkers Danielle Mareschal and Bob Rich.
The two volunteers, based at the San Gabriel Pomona Valley Red Cross, worked diligently to piece together a timeline about Joseph and his family, after they were sent to Poland’s Lodz Ghetto in October, 1942. Then they contacted Cheryl.
Meeting with the Zoller sisters at Cheryl’s Beverly Hills home, the caseworkers were able to provide an original copy of Joseph’s prisoner number — B6937 — which he received at Middlebau concentration camp, a subcamp of Auschwitz. Joseph, who had been a fifteen-year-old student and avid soccer player in his hometown, was forced to work for the rest of the war at the Furstengrube coal mine. After he was liberated in 1945, Joseph lived in several displacement camps in Germany before he emigrated to Los Angeles in 1947.
The caseworkers also were able to confirm the fate of Joseph’s father, Abraham, who died in the ghetto, and his mother, Doba, who was killed at the Chelmo extermination camp, 30 miles from her home. One sister survived, which was known, but the fate of the two brothers and one other sister is still unknown.
A tearful Martine Zoller thanked Mareschal and Rich and the Red Cross for locating the records: “We are survivors of the survivor, and every new piece of information helps keep the memory of my father alive.”
For Cheryl, whose son was named after his grandfather, “The news provided us with some closure and filled in the blanks that we’ve been longing for.”
Says Mareschal, “The Holocaust tracing cases stay open forever, because the names are always in the data base. A case is reactivated when new information comes in. …..it is a life-long project for the Red Cross.”
For information about Holocaust Tracing or Red Cross International Services, please contact 310 477-5176.
