The Researcher

Samantha Seligman-Grajewski

Third generation. Granddaughter of Helen Landó Helman of Tiszabogdány. Founder of Engineering Remembrance.

I work in process engineering and I am finishing an M.S. in Chemical Engineering at Stanford. I had no training in Holocaust research or genealogy when I started, and I still have none. What I had was a way of thinking about systems, and a grandmother whose family had been reduced to a village name and a handful of first names.

Helen was the only survivor of her immediate family. Her mother, her father and five of her brothers and sisters were murdered. For most of my life we had nothing of them. No photograph, no grave, no date. The family held one Buchenwald prisoner card for her father, which only reached us in 2019, when the Arolsen Archives put their holdings online, and assumed that was the end of what could be known.

I started looking properly in 2026.

What I found

Among the records are the Buchenwald intake photographs of Helen’s father and his two nephews, carters like him, photographed one behind the other and numbered 322, 323 and 324. They were the first images our family had ever seen of anyone on Helen’s side.

Through records alone I reconstructed the nephews’ survival: both lived, and in June 1945 they found Helen in Budapest and told her what had happened to her family. She described those two men in her own recorded testimony and never named them. The documents named them.

Following them forward reached living descendants in Israel and the United States, from a branch that had settled on a kibbutz before the war. Their family tree was missing Zacharias and David, two of Iczik’s sons, and everyone who came after them. I was able to tell them that one of those brothers had a daughter who survived.

A future prediction she left

In 2008 Helen sat for a recorded interview. Near the end, the interviewer asks about her grandchildren.

I was sixteen. I had said once, at her kitchen table, that I wanted to go to Stanford, and then I never applied. I went to UCLA for my undergraduate degree. Eighteen years later I applied to Stanford for a master’s and was admitted, and that July I listened to this tape again and heard what she had done with a passing remark from a teenager.

InterviewerYes, well what’s the other? You said you had three grandchildren?

HelenYes… Samantha.

InterviewerRight.

HelenShe is sixteen, exactly sixteen. And she, she is in school, in high school. She hopes, she hopes to go, if she makes it, she’s pretty smart, to Stanford. She would like to go to Stanford University.

Speaking

World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, 36th Annual Conference, Philadelphia, 23 to 26 October 2026. Exhibiting throughout the conference, with a Saturday workshop and a Sunday session.

Get in touch

If you are trying to find your own family and do not know where to start, or if you work with a collection this method might help, write to me. I read everything.

If you want the method rather than the story, it is on the method page, with every collection I used. Both are free and always will be.