From the Ashes: Documents of a Jewish Family is a two-volume documentary history assembled from original records spanning nearly two centuries of Jewish family life, migration, persecution, destruction, survival, and renewal.
Drawn from the archives of the Glück, Schwartz, Klein, Moskovics, and related families of Polyán, Lelesz, and the surrounding region of historic Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the work presents hundreds of primary-source documents preserved across generations. Together, the two volumes comprise more than 750 pages of records, photographs, translations, annotations, and historical context.
The collection includes:
- 19th- and early 20th-century census records from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, and the United States
- Immigration and travel records, including railway and ship tickets, passenger manifests, arrival records, visa applications, and citizenship documents
- U.S. draft registrations and military service records
- Holocaust documentation, including deportation lists, prisoner records, forced-labor assignments, confiscation inventories, camp registrations, transfer records, and death records
- Property deeds, cadastral records, contracts, transfers, and inheritance documents
- Postwar property rulings, guardianship appointments, restitution petitions, legal claims, and official decisions issued under changing political regimes
- Vital records including: birth, marriage, death, and civil-registration records from Europe and America
- Newspaper reports, communal records, family photographs, and other historical materials
Each document is accompanied by explanatory material identifying the people, places, institutions, and historical circumstances represented. Translations and cross-references connect records created in different languages and countries, allowing fragments scattered across family, governmental, military, municipal, genealogical, and Holocaust archives to be understood as parts of a single history.
The documents trace the family from nineteenth-century Central Europe through immigration to the United States, the Holocaust, postwar reconstruction, restitution proceedings, and the preservation of family memory. They reveal how ordinary lives were recorded-and often controlled-by successive governments, courts, armies, institutions, and bureaucracies.
From the Ashes was edited and compiled by Sherwin Gluck, grandson of Holocaust survivors and custodian of the Gluck Family Papers, a family archive preserved as a Special Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A companion to Private Good Luck, Pappus: The Saga of a Jewish Family, As I Remember..., and Fixed in Silver, From the Ashes completes an extensive family-based record of Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Meticulously assembled and deeply personal, this documentary history demonstrates how seemingly impersonal records-a census entry, property transfer, prisoner card, visa application, or official ruling-can preserve the evidence of lives, relationships, communities, and a world that persecution sought to erase.
