After a long wait, Holocaust survivors and their descendants' hopes were realized last summer as the first set of digitized records from a major trove of Holocaust-era documents was transferred to the Holocaust Memorial Museum <www.ushmm.org> in Washington, DC.

Allied forces discovered the files at the end of World War II, and stashed them at the International Tracing Service (ITS) set up in Bad Arolsen, Germany, to reunite families separated during the war. The ITS archives — comprising 30 to 50 million pages of documents — include records of camps, prisoner transportation, ghettos and arrests. Nearly 40 million Central Name Index cards contain 17.5 million names from those records.