Final Certainty on his father’s fate
Decades after the actual event, Otto Romberg, Holocaust survivor and editor of the journal “TRIBÜNE”, for the first time has come to know for certain the place where his father was murdered by the Nazis. Documents kept in the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen testify to the fact that his father Otto Roboz, born in Hungary in 1897, was deported from Budapest to Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen early in December 1944. “It relieves me greatly that I have finally attained – though only after 65 years – certainty on my father’s fate,” said Romberg.
The ITS archive keeps several documents on Otto Romberg’s and his mother’s unhappy period in life when they were fugitives, among them their registration in Austria and a letter of his mother on their life stories. The two Hungarians were recognized as political refugees. Romberg ended up as correspondent in Germany, in the country of the perpetrators. It was in 1960 when the sight of swastikas daubed on the walls of private and public houses prompted him to establish the journal “TRIBÜNE” ever since dedicated to understanding and explaining Jewry. The cruel experience he had gone through during his childhood is the root and motivation of both his committed combat of Anti-Semitism and his standing up for tolerance and freedom.
At ITS, the Frankfurt citizen and his wife looked into the documents on his family’s fate and visited the archives. “I am glad about the existence of the tracing service,” said Romberg. “But: it should have been opened to research much earlier as individual fates are most likely to strike people.” One day after his visit to ITS, Romberg travelled on to Bergen-Belsen. In the memorial site there, the 76 years-old now has found a place where he can mourn his father.