The Stories Behind the Index Cards
The importance of the documents at the heart of the 2026 #everynamecounts challenge
Who were the people who were taken by the German occupying forces to a barracks located between Brussels and Antwerp and ultimately deported to Auschwitz? What did they have in common with the families in a French housing complex 300 kilometers away, just north of Paris, who anxiously awaited an uncertain future? Answers to these questions can be found in a card file held by the Archives Service for War Victims at the State Archives of Belgium in Brussels. This card file is the focus of the 2026 #everynamecounts challenge. Among other things, it contains information about how victims of Nazi persecution from various European countries tried to find safety.
The young mother smiles warmly into the camera with a little boy on her lap. The photo on the index card from Brussels shows Stephanie Wolfthal and her son Louis. When Louis was born in 1936, Stephanie and her husband Heinrich were living in Vienna. She was a Catholic, but the records of the Nazi authorities listed him as a Jew. After Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Heinrich’s father was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. The young family decided to flee and left Vienna for Luxembourg. But even there, they could not find permanent protection. When German troops invaded, they were expelled from the country and forced to leave. They fled to Schaerbeek, in the north of Brussels. But the family had already come to the attention of the Nazis. To monitor and document the deportation and murder of people classified as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, the Security Service of the German Security Police created index cards, listing Jews officially registered as residents of Belgium. The index card with the photo of Stephanie and her son was created in this context. Fortunately, the family was able to go into hiding in Brussels. They survived and emigrated to Argentina in 1950. Louis would later return to Brussels.
The Fuchs family suffered a very different fate. Edith and Kurt Fuchs were born in Vienna too. Together with their father and younger sister, they fled Austria to escape Nazi persecution. Their intended destination was Great Britain, where their mother was working as a domestic servant. But their escape did not go as planned: The family, persecuted because they were classified as Jews, only made it as far as Brussels, where they tried to build a new life.
They managed well at first – even under German occupation from 1940 onwards. But in October 1942, the Gestapo also arrested Kurt, Edith, and their father. All three were deported to Mechelen. Margit, the younger sister, is not present at the time of the arrest – she survives.
Index cards bearing witness to systematic extermination
The SS set up a central assembly camp in the Dossin barracks in Mechelen (Belgium). Himmler ordered that all Jews from Belgium be rounded up there for deportation to the extermination camps. Refugees from abroad were the first to be targeted. Edith and Kurt were deported with their father on October 24. The words “labor assignment” were stamped on their index cards, but their true destination was the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
More than 25,000 men, women and children, whose ages ranged between 39 days and 93 years, were deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz. Most were killed immediately, like Edith and her father. Seventeen-year-old Kurt was selected for forced labor and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was one of just under 1,400 people who survived the deportations from Mechelen.
Attempt to escape to France
Tobias Schiff emigrated from Poland to Belgium with his mother and sister in 1928, at the age of three. His father was already living and working in Antwerp at the time. In 1942, when his sister was arrested and deported by the German occupying forces, Tobias and his parents tried to flee.
But the family was captured on August 13, 1942, at the border between occupied and unoccupied France. This was the start of an odyssey through several camps which ended with their arrival at the Drancy assembly camp. From there, the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz on August 28, 1942.
For Tobias’s mother, the journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau ended with her death. Tobias and his father were deported to Cosel in Upper Silesia, where they had to perform forced labor. After spending a year and a half in various camps, his father was also murdered by the SS in Auschwitz.
Drancy internment camp: The last stop for tens of thousands on the way to Auschwitz
When the French army was defeated in June 1940, the German Wehrmacht occupied the whole of northern France. In Drancy, just north of Paris, German troops took over a four-story U-shaped building with a central courtyard that was 200 meters long and 40 meters wide. Originally intended to provide housing for the poor, the whole complex was turned into an internment camp. At first, it held prisoners of war, but from 1941 onwards it was primarily used to hold Jews. Between 1941 and 1944, Drancy was the Nazis’ largest assembly and transit camp in France.
By July 31, 1944, 65,000 people had been deported from Drancy to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Most were women and children, and they were murdered in Auschwitz. Only around 2,000 of those deported from Drancy survived.
The Arolsen Archives invite you to take part in the 2026 #everynamecounts challenge. Help us remember victims of Nazi persecution by digitizing a key collection of documents on the deportations from Mechelen and French camps such as Drancy. Every name counts!
Deported to Auschwitz from Mechelen or Drancy
