Who Knows, Who Has Heard? The Story of the Search Bureau for Missing Relatives
Radio play and discussion with the authors Noam Brusilovsky and Ofer Waldman on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Europe from National Socialism (in German)
Search Bureau for Missing Relatives; photo: Central Zionist Archive
“The Search Bureau for Missing Relatives received messages and greetings from relatives and friends from all over the country and the world.”
With these words, the radio program Who Knows, Who Has Heard? began three times a week, broadcast from 1945 onwards on the Kol Yerushalayim (The Voice of Jerusalem, later Kol Israel) radio station with an international reach. The program was used to search for missing persons whose whose traces had been lost in the Holocaust and who were sought by relatives after the end of the war.
Sun 11 May 2025, 4 pm
Where
W. M. Blumenthal Academy,
Klaus Mangold Auditorium
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin
(Opposite the Museum)
In their one-hour radio play, authors Noam Brusilovsky and Ofer Waldman have reconstructed the original broadcast to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The radio play is based on historical broadcast scripts in German, Yiddish, English and Hebrew, which are held in the Zionist Archive in Jerusalem.
In cooperation with rbb, we present the radio play and talk to the author duo Noam Brusilovsky and Ofer Waldman about the unusual research and production.
The event is part of the city-wide theme week 80 Years of the End of the War - Liberation of Europe from National Socialism, initiated and funded by the State of Berlin, realized by Kulturprojekte Berlin with numerous partners. In cooperation with rbb.
More about the historical program Who Knows, Who Has Heard?
At the end of the Second World War, millions of soldiers and civilians across Europe were considered missing. In Germany alone, every fourth person was a missing person in May 1945. The chaos after the war, flight and expulsion was unmanageable. From the end of 1945, German-language radio stations also broadcast search reports – often directly in cooperation with the German Red Cross. The search for Jewish survivors was conducted via other channels and proved to be particularly difficult. They were often stateless, displaced persons (DPs) in camps all over Europe and prevented from returning home by the hostility of their former non-Jewish environment. There were pogroms against returning Jews until well into 1946. Often the only survivors of almost completely wiped out communities, the role of Jewish survivors as people who were searching and were searched for at the same time was extremely precarious. Several aid organizations from Europe, the USA and the Jewish community in Palestine were involved in coordinating this search operation after the end of the war and jointly compiled lists of survivors.
To this day, the program Who Knows, Who Has Heard? plays a central role in the representation of Holocaust remembrance in Israel. For many Israelis, the program, which was broadcast three times a week after the midday news, offered a first, direct insight into the reality of life for many Holocaust survivors. For the survivors themselves, as well as for their families, the end of the Second World War heralded an existential crisis: In the shadow of the collective loss of the Jewish people, they had to come to terms with the loss of their own close circles. This was compounded, no less shatteringly, by the ordeal of uncertainty about the fate of relatives and friends. Moreover, everyday life in the young Israeli state, which was characterized by war and hardship, left little room for mourning. The program Who Knows, Who Has Heard? established itself as a private and collective place of remembrance.
