Family finds cousin feared lost to Holocaust

On Feb. 23, Allan Richter sat in the dining room of his Smithtown home while the clock ticked slowly toward a scheduled Zoom chat with a long-lost relative and her family in Switzerland.

“I have butterflies,” he said. Those flutters in his stomach — a mix of joy and anticipation — were understandable.

A freelance journalist and proud Jewish father of two daughters, Richter, 62, has dreamed about meeting his late mother’s cousin, Hélène Leuchter, even before he was certain of her name.

“We’ve been waiting all our lives for this,” Richter told her through tears as the session commenced. “You’ve been in our hearts.”

Eighty years ago, Hélène, along with her father, Abraham Mitschnik, disappeared during the Holocaust. “It was a tragic hole in our family story,” said Richter. “It was a mystery.”

Solving it would require decades of waiting — and more than a little bit of luck. “We believe that’s God,” said Sheela Richter, 60, a Western Suffolk BOCES teacher for children who are visually impaired.

MAX AND ABRAHAM

Before the remote family gathering began, Richter retraced his history. “When I was growing up in Queens,” he said, “we talked about the Holocaust and how our family was affected.”

He recalled that his maternal grandfather, Max Wallack, had come to New York City from Russia before World War II. During the war and in years that followed it, Wallack, who worked as a carpenter and settled in Queens with his wife, Evelyn, and their daughter, Dorothy, tried to locate his beloved brother, Abraham.

“My mom would talk about how her father would take her to lower Manhattan almost on a weekly basis,” Richter said. They would go to an organization called HIAS, short for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, seeking information.

They knew only that Abraham had fled Russia to France, that he had changed his surname to Mitschnik, possibly to shield his identity, and that he had a daughter, Hélène. Abraham’s wife had died before the war, they believed.

“We don’t know how Abraham ended up in Paris and Max ended up in New York,” said Sheela Richter.

Max Wallack died in 1967. Dorothy, a teacher who had married and had a family with Sam Richter, a doctor, still spoke often of her uncle and first cousin at their home in Rego Park, Queens.

In 1994, Allan and Sheela got married at a synagogue in North Woodmere and honeymooned in France and Italy. They took with them all the information they had on Abraham Mitschnik: birthplace Odesa, and his birth date.

“We also had a photo headshot, and that’s all we had,” said Allan Richter.

The honeymooners savored the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks. But, their agenda included something deeper.

“I said, ‘Let’s devote half a day to just focusing on seeing what we could find out about Abraham and his daughter,’ ” Richter said.

DEPORTED TO AUSCHWITZ

They made their way to a resource center in Paris that had deportation information. Their efforts led them to a 1983 book by Serge Klarsfeld, an activist known for painstakingly documenting the Holocaust. In the book, “Memorial to the Jews Deported From France 1942-1944,” Richter found his great-uncle’s name and information about his fate.

In July 1942, Abraham Mitschnik had been deported from France to the Auschwitz concentration camp. “It told us the actual convoy that he was on,” Richter said, adding that there were more than 1,000 men and women on the train. “He was in this cramped cattle car for three days.”

“To our knowledge,” Klarsfeld’s text reads, “there were only 16 survivors from this convoy in 1945.”

It was almost certain that Abraham Mitschnik was not among them. The knowledge gave a sense of closure. “I felt a jumble of sadness and euphoria,” Richter said. When he called his mother and father, they were flooded with the same complicated feelings.

But a question remained: What about Hélène? The Richters knew that Jewish children were hidden in orphanages and convents to prevent them from being taken. Was Hélène one of them?

“Sheela and I made a commitment to return to Paris the following summer to look,” Richter said.

At the time, Richter was working for a tech publication. “I basically left my job to do this,” he said. “I decided that finding Abraham Mitschnik’s daughter was more important than the latest Windows 95 release.”

The summer of ’95 was eventful on personal and global fronts. Richter approached the trip as a journalist, interviewing people about the Holocaust and its impact on their lives.

“Enough time had passed that people were talking about it,” he said. The Richters were present for then-French President Jacques Chirac’s historic acknowledgment of the nation’s role in the deportation of Jews during World War II.

The couple also met with Klarsfeld. “He’s a hero,” said Richter, whose copy of “Memorial to the Jews” has two inscriptions from the author. One is to Allan and Sheela. The other is to Dorothy and Max.

The Richters “went to Auschwitz to get the big picture,” Richter said. “It was surreal and sad and strange. It was comforting in an odd way because we were able to say Kaddish [a prayer] for Abraham.”

They learned no new information about Hélène.

2023 DISCOVERY

Fast-forward three decades to 2023. The Richters had settled contentedly into life with their children, Rachel, 20, who’s at SUNY Brockport, and Emma, 22, who’s spending a year at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem before beginning law school next year.

In January, Emma traveled to Poland with a group to visit concentration camps. While there, she searched for information about Abraham Mitschnik. She was directed to look into a digital database maintained by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.

To her astonishment Emma discovered that in 2005 a document had been placed with the organization as a memorial to Abraham Mitschnik. It was submitted by his daughter, Hélène Leuchter, who at the time was living in Geneva.

Emma texted her parents. They confirmed that, yes, Abraham’s daughter’s name was Hélène.

“It’s amazing,” Emma said, adding that a longtime Pardes staffer told her that “this never happens.”

But it did. “That was the epiphany,” said Sheela Richter. “We knew Hélène had been alive in 2005, but we didn’t know if she was still alive.”

Allan Richter, chair of the Suffolk County Jewish Advisory Board, beamed proudly at Emma’s discovery and marveled that it came one week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The document led the Richters directly to an address and phone number in Switzerland. They had found Hélène. Emails followed. Plans were made for the virtual meeting.

It was an international chat — Allan and Sheela on Long Island, Allan’s brother, Michael Richter, in Queens, Emma in Jerusalem, and Hélène and her husband, Bernard, plus a daughter and son-in-law, Martine and Gianni Panagia, and their son, Théo, in Geneva.

“I’m awestruck,” Allan told Hélène. “It’s a highlight of my life to meet and know you.”

Hélène is no longer a mystery. She is not a tragedy. She is an 85-year-old Jewish wife, mother and grandmother who survived the Holocaust because of her father. In July 1942, the same month he was deported to the death camp, he placed her in an orphanage in Paris.

She was adopted by a Christian mother and Jewish father and had a happy life in France. She has kept her Jewish faith. At age 20 she wanted to pursue a career in clothing design. Where to go? She flipped a coin — Montreal or Geneva — and she’s made a home in Switzerland since. Her tight-knit family lives close together.

Hélène didn’t know she had a cousin Dorothy. “It is really a great surprise for us,” said Martine.

Throughout the chat, Hélène held hands with her husband and daughter, smiling and laughing often. She doesn’t speak English, so Théo translated for her. Decades melted away as the participants inquired about the past (no one knows why Abraham changed his surname; Hélène’s mother died before the war) and about one another’s lives today.

Martine called Emma “our little hero.” The family appreciated that the Richters had said the mourner’s prayer at Auschwitz for Abraham.

Before the meeting, Allan Richter had shared a photograph via email with Hélène. In it he’s seen with Serge Klarsfeld and holding a little picture of her father. The image of Abraham Mitschnik is small, but the impact was enormous.

“We really had no photo at all,” said Martine. “That was a problem for my mother. She wanted to have a picture. That’s a great present.”

Speaking on behalf of his grandmother, Théo said, “She can’t say much, but her heart is full.”

By this time Allan Richter’s butterflies had calmed down. He felt gratitude for his family’s reunion. He wished that his mother, who died in 2021, had lived to see it.

Before he signed off, Richter vowed to stay in touch. He’d no longer be ending emails closing with “best regards,” he said. “I’m going to sign them ‘love.’ ”