Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, my mother-in-law, my grandmothers, and — of course — my amazing wife! Thank you for absolutely everything!

Yesterday, with the help of Ken Walzer (a former college professor of mine), my family got ahold of several historical documents we’d never seen before.

They provide a record, albeit incomplete, of my grandfather’s internment in several Nazi concentration camps in the mid-1940s.

While we’ve always known about this part of our history, we didn’t really have much in the way of documentation. When I first mentioned that my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor on this blog, in a post about a visit I took to Buchenwald, people asked for more information. But all I knew were the few things my grandfather recalled about his brief time at Buchenwald. As I wrote to Walzer:

He said that he was only at Buchenwald for about a week, shortly after his 20th birthday, in late February 1945. He was born on February 3, 1925.

He was marched to Buchenwald by the SS and he was marched from Buchenwald about a week later. The prisoners there were building barracks into the hillside, he remembers, and when they would go out to work they would be in danger of being shot by Allied troops.

So, what have we learned?

First, we learned why it was difficult to find documentation on my grandfather. He was born in Vişeu de Sus, in Transylvania (now Romania). But he’s listed here as coming from Felsővisó, which is the Hungarian place name. We never checked under the Hungarian name, even though the territory was disputed for quite a long time and changed hands during my grandfather’s early life.

What’s more, his name is Zalman Kohen but he’s listed here as Zoltan Kahan. When we first started looking for documentation, we learned that there were no Z. Kohens or Z. Cohens on transport lists for Buchenwald in February 1945. But when I was visiting my grandparents two weeks ago, my grandmother mentioned that his family weren’t Kohens back in Europe; they were Kahans or Cahans. I mentioned this to Walzer, who wrote to a friend at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and we had these documents in 24 hours. Zalman or Zelman would be my grandfather’s Yiddish name; Zoltan would have been his Hungarian name. Sure enough, he is listed here as Hungarian Jewish Prisoner #137429 at Buchenwald in February 1945.

In addition, though we still don’t have transport information into Buchenwald, we now have transport information out. From Buchenwald, he was sent to SIII (Sonderbauvorhaben III or Ohrdruf) on March 14. It is likely to have been there that he saw prisoners building barracks, which might have been the never-completed Jonastal project. From there, he was sent to Flossenbürg on March 26.

Finally, with this information, it might be possible to more fully trace my grandfather’s journey through the Nazi camp system and to assign dates to his memories of that time. It opens up a whole new source of information for us and, for a family with so little information about so many relatives who were murdered, every scrap and every minute detail means a great deal.

I’ve written about the theory of restorative justice quite a lot, but I’m now able to more fully experience some of what I wrote and knew, intellectually, to be right: In the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, victims’ families are often left without any information about what happened and so creating an agreed upon historical record is an important part of achieving some measure of healing.

I haven’t been able to stop looking at these documents that showed up unannounced in my Inbox yesterday because they represent a key part of the history of my family, missing pieces of a puzzle I never really knew I needed to complete.

My grandfather in the Portraits of Honor exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit.

More on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Photo: Ilana Liss.

When I quit using Tumblr in a few days, this picture will succinctly tell the story of why I’ve given up on it.

I know this post is a bit “Inside Baseball” for a big chunk of my regular readers — to whom I apologize — but, honestly, the update that Tumblr pushed out to users this week is hideous. Worse than the aesthetics, though, is that it’s now significantly more difficult to use the blogging platform than it was a few days ago (and its ease of use has always been one of my main reasons for blogging here).

Apart from the fact that I’ve tried to save this post four times and just keep seeing a spinning wheel that tells me something isn’t working properly somewhere, does someone really think the above photo looks like a good way for people to edit what they’re writing? Can you imagine using a word processing program that put footnotes in the middle of a random line of text or that forced you to constantly scroll down to get around the “Save” button?

Clearly, my sleep tracker/pedometer/life coach is not designed for new parents.

Not getting eight hours of sleep a night? Just try to sleep a little more!

Tell that to my kids, Jawbone Up …

I don’t often post the nice messages I receive here at the blog, as the nasty ones tend to be funnier. But this one really stood out to me because it’s pretty important to me to attract the best students to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In the past few months, I’ve attended a number of events designed to provide talented high school students with information about the University of Nebraska. And one of the most common refrains I’ve heard is that one of the biggest choices they’ll have to make is whether to stay in Omaha or come to Lincoln. I wouldn’t have thought, before I moved to Omaha, that this was a choice in anyone’s mind. But when I first moved here, and everyone I met assumed that I taught at UNO or that I would want to simply “switch” to UNO’s political science department to save myself the drive, I began to realize that people think the University of Nebraska is the University of Nebraska, whether it’s in Lincoln or in Omaha.

If my blog persuades even one person to make the switch, I’m happy.

I thought 2011 was an exciting year for my blog, as readership doubled from 2010. I hoped it could happen again in 2012 and, thanks to your interest, 2012 saw more than 100% increase in both visits and unique visitors to this blog.

So … a huge thank you to everyone who visited the site in the past year; as an academic, there’s really nothing better than when one’s ideas are read, thought about, and discussed.

I don’t know that it’s possible, but here’s hoping readership can double again this year. Don’t forget to keep coming back and to recommend the blog to your friends in 2013!

Happy New Year!

Thanks for following along, Tumblr!

As you can see, 2012 saw a major leap in both my writing and your interest in this blog: More than 1,000 new posts and more than 1,000 new followers this year.

Since a lot of Tumblr users seem to be reading — or at least the possibility exists that you might be reading, as there’s no way to track how many people actually see this on the Tumblr Dashboard — this is a good time for you to tell me a little bit about yourselves: Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?

And, of course, thanks to everyone who reads the blog via RSS, who follows links from Facebook and Twitter, or who somehow ends up here via Google search. I’m happy and honored that you’ve chosen to spend a few minutes here daily, weekly, monthly, or just once during the past year.

Thanks also to all of you for reading, liking, tweeting, reblogging, commenting, recommending, and asking questions.