Finding Your Roots

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In the archives of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, we found six pages of testimony detailing the fate of Damon's relatives. Name, Menachem Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto. Bialystok. Name Rivka Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto.

Bialystok. Name, Rachel Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto. Bialystok. Married, number of children, one.

Name, Yisrael Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto. Bialystok. Name, Leah Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto. Bialystok.

Married, number of children, two. Name, Leah Locke, circumstances of death, ghetto. Bialystok. So the whole family.

So the whole family. Your great-grandmother Dora's brother, Menachem, and his wife, Rivka, and four of their children, died in the Bialystok ghetto. Well, we know what would've happened to Dora had she not made it out. Yeah.

And you visited Yad Vashem. Did it ever occur to you that you had family members listed in its records, its archives? I assumed there must be some line of family, but I didn't know their name. I didn't know who the Lockes were.

I wouldn't even know where to look before today. -

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

What's it like to, to learn this, to be able to particularize the Holocaust in this intimate and horribly sad way? It's somewhat of a... an affirmation of survival, in some strange way.