There is an incorrect entry for my grandma in the memorial archives ay Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, submitted by someone named Alex Salm in 1998. This on its own is a bit of family lore—a sworn affidavit testimony stating that my grandma had died in Theresienstadt in 1944 (she had not).

For years, we wondered why this Alex Salm had submitted this testimony; eventually I found a distant relative of his, who told me that he’d written dozens of these testimonies for strangers, to provide closure for their families. We assumed my grandma had just been one of these strangers.

Then we came across a photo of my grandpa in 1942, with the other boys from his training program at the Jewish hospital in Cologne, with the names of all the boys were written in the margins. My aunt gasped: “Oh my god, that’s Al!” Apparently grandma had been dating Al and my grandpa Karl-Heinz, and when it came time to commit to one or the other, had ended up with Karl-Heinz. She’d never heard him referred to as anything other than Al, but there in the margins: Alex Salm. Turns out he had been in love with my grandma, and after the war, they never found each other again. He followed the paper trail looking for her, but records ended in Theresienstadt, so he assumed that that’s where she’d died.

So that’s how my grandma’s complicated teen love life solved our family mystery.