Amos Cohen stands in front of the grave of his long lost relative Rose Kobylinski in Swierlany, Poland. Her fate at the end of World War II as a victim of the Germans was just recently discovered.

NEW YORK -- While Israel recently marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day dedicated to the 70^th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could still just be learning the fate of their loved ones from that tragic era.

But that’s exactly what happened to Amos Cohen, a shipbuilder living in Haifa, Israel. He only recently learned the fate of his long-lost relative Rose Kobylinski, who died in a German death march and was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in a small village in Poland.

For decades Rose was only a name circled in black on a family tree, meaning she had died in the Holocaust. 

The genealogical chart had been drawn up by Cohen’s mother, Rose’s cousin. Other than Rose’s name on the tree, all that Cohen, 64, knew about her was that she had lived in Berlin before being deported to a German death camp.

Nothing else was known -- there had been no news about Rose since the Holocaust.

Then, one day, Cohen received a call from Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.  

“We think we found your relative,” the caller said. “And she is buried in the cemetery of St. Anna’s Roman Catholic Church in Swierklany, Poland.”

The search for Rose began in 1990 when Cohen’s mother made a formal inquiry, hoping that Yad Vashem might have information about her fate. No information was available.

“It was sad that my mother died never knowing what happened to her cousin, Rose,” said Cohen.

When Cohen went to Swierklany, a small village in southwest Poland, in April 2010 he pieced together what had happened to her. He recited Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, in the church cemetery where Rose is buried in a mass grave with nine others, all murdered by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945.

Konstanty Dolnik, the local undertaker, buried the victims in the cemetery in defiance of German orders to bury them in a forest to erase their memories. Dolnik also recorded the numbers tattooed on their forearms.

In 1948, the town erected a monument with a cross to mark the mass grave. Only the numbers recorded by Dolnik identified the grave’s occupants. There were no names. 

The breakthrough in the search for Rose came when Yaki Gantz, a former member of Israel’s domestic security force (the Israeli version of the FBI), became involved. Gantz heads a project called “For Every Number There is a Name.” 

“Their relatives now know that their relatives didn’t just become ashes at Auschwitz,” he said in a phone interview. “They know there is a place where they can come to say Kaddish.”

The new plaque at the previously unmarked grave in Swierlany, Poland now reads: "In memory of the death march victims from Aushwitz-Birkenau," and lists the victims concentration camp numbers or names.

When Gantz learned about the grave in Swierklany, he sent the numbers to Yad Vashem with information from the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

The museum had just obtained documents that the Russian troops seized when liberating Auschwitz in 1945. This Auschwitz data recently obtained from Russia proved critical in matching many numbers to names.

Krystyna Manka, the now 75-year-old daughter of Dolnik, the undertaker, wept as she remembers the sub-zero January night when the prisoners arrived from Auschwitz during an ice storm.

“It’s hard for me to talk about that night,” she told NBC News through a translator.

Manka was seven years old in 1945 when the Germans, losing the war, began marching concentration camp prisoners in Poland to Germany in what are known as death marches.   

Wearing rags and clogs that bloodied their feet, the prisoners were often shot to death when they could not walk fast enough. They were guarded by German SS men and barking dogs. The Germans spent the night in the village of Swierklany. One of the female prisoners stayed in Manka’s home that night – although she doesn’t know if it was Rose.   

“I still remember her beautiful blond curly hair,” Manka said. “Her feet were torn by the wooden shoes and the long walk in the freezing cold.” They had walked 40 miles, the distance from Auschwitz to Swierklany, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Manka’s father applied ointment to the woman’s feet and dressed the wounds. Manka’s mother, fluent in German, convinced an SS guard that treating the wounds would make the woman walk better and not slow the march.

It didn’t really matter. The next day, 10 prisoners were shot to death outside the village, including the woman who had stayed in Manka’s home.

The residents of Swierklany mark this massacre with an annual remembrance service on Jan. 18, and also during religious holidays, most recently on Good Friday.

“The fact that the Jews are buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery helps us to recognize that we are brothers,” said Father Jan Klyczka, a priest in the village for the last 40 years, in a phone interview.

Local teenagers maintain the grave and learn about a massacre that’s hard for them to imagine, said their history teacher, Iwona Barchanska.

Gantz continues to scour the dirt roads and churches of rural Poland, seeking to restore the names of the murdered.

“When a person finishes life, he has a name. He is not a number,” said Gantz.

Now, beneath the 1948 monument where there were once only numbers, there is a new memorial plaque with names that include Rose Kobylinski.

Abir Sultan/ EPA

An Israeli man stands in the Hall of Remembrances in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial complex in Jerusalem, as Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday.

TEL AVIV, Israel - Israel honored the 6 million Jews killed in World War II during the annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration on Monday, with people standing to attention as sirens rang out across the country. 

One organization is dedicated to helping those who survived Germany’s killing machine, many of whom live alone and in poverty.

“We hear every year that survivors don’t have enough food,” said Jay Shultz, 37, the founder of Adopt-A-Safta, which means “adopt-a-grandmother” in Hebrew.

“They can’t pay their electricity bills and their number-one complaint is simple loneliness,” said Shultz.

Indeed, many Holocaust survivors have no living relatives, and, according to a 2012 report by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, one-in-four live below the poverty line.

Shultz was inspired to start Adopt-A-Safta after he found out that he had a great aunt living in Haifa, northern Israel, soon after arriving in Israel seven years ago.  The not-for-profit pairs young professional Israelis with lonely Holocaust survivors.  

“(She) was a Holocaust survivor like my grandparents,” said Shultz, who is also the head of an organization the helps Jews who move to Israel to stay in the country. “She was very lonely with no family here.”

Courtesy of Jay Shultz

Jay Shultz, right, founder of Adopt-A-Safta, poses with his mother, Sabina Shultz, left, and Csilla Dunklemen, Jay's adopted grandmother, who was the inspiration for the Adopt-A-Safta organization, in Haifa.

He called his aunt, Csilla Dunkelmen, and they adopted each other.  They usually didn’t do anything very special – a short talk on the telephone, a coffee date, a walk in the park or a visit to a movie theater.

“This new relationship gave me so much more than it gave her,” Shultz said.  “Knowing I had some family connection here, someone to call and hear me out was phenomenal.”

The organization, which has introduced around 300 volunteers with the same number of survivors, is in a race against time – 35 Holocaust survivors pass away every day, according to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims. Dunkelmen, the inspiration for the organization, died two years ago.

So Shultz aims to continue connecting as many volunteers with survivors as possible, for as long as possible.

“This connection gives survivors family that they didn’t have before, it gives them a lifeline to the world,” Shultz said.

Related:

Kerry lays wreath at Holocaust memorial, talks Mideast peace

Evert Elzinga / EPA

A site at Schiphol airport where an unexploded World War II bomb was found during excavation works on Wednesday.

Parts of Amsterdam's Schiphol international airport – one of Europe's busiest aviation hubs – were shut down Wednesday after workers found an undetonated bomb during routine construction work.

"This will most likely have an impact on flight routine at our airport and could lead to delays and cancellations," an airport official told NBC News.

Workers found the explosive device during construction work on a new hydrant system to be used for re-fueling aircraft.

Experts blow up 550-pound WWII bomb found in Munich

Schiphol is one of Europe's busiest airports and handles approximately 50 million passengers annually.

A statement on its website said: "The bomb squad is investigating at the moment. This may have implications for air traffic in the form of cancellations and delays."

The Brussels-based main European air traffic control agency, Eurocontrol, posted on Twitter that passengers could expect "major delays."

The find comes only a day after experts in Munich triggered a controlled explosion of a 550-pound American WWII bomb in the center of Munich.

"A bomb disposal team with experts is presently assessing the situation, which will determine how long we will need to keep the section of the terminal closed," Cora Koopstra, from the airport's "action team," told NBC News.

The device was discovered at "Pier C," the wing of the terminal used mainly by flights to and from the European Union's passport-free Schengen zone. The terminal is a busy hub for European travelers and those connecting to Schengen destinations from international flights such as those from the U.S.

During World War II, Nazi Germany used the airport as a base for air raids on Britain. In 1943, the airport was destroyed by allied fighter aircraft; 400 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on the complex.

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Rick Bowmer / AP

A copy of The New York Times published on May 8, 1945, featuring a story by former AP Paris bureau chief Ed Kennedy, fired by the AP after he became the first journalist to file a firsthand account of German officials surrendering unconditionally to Allied commanders.

NEW YORK -- In World War II's final moments in Europe, Associated Press correspondent Edward Kennedy gave his news agency perhaps the biggest scoop in its history. He reported -- a full day ahead of the competition -- that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally at a former schoolhouse in Reims, France. 

For this, he was publicly rebuked by the AP, and then quietly fired.

The problem: Kennedy had defied military censors to get the story out. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Harry Truman had agreed to suppress news of the capitulation for a day, in order to allow Stalin to stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin. Kennedy was also accused of breaking a pledge that he and 16 other journalists had made to keep the surrender a secret for a time, as a condition of being allowed to witness it firsthand.

Sixty-seven years later, the AP's top executive is apologizing for the way the company treated Kennedy.

"It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way," said president and CEO Tom Curley.

Kennedy, he said, "did everything just right."

Curley rejected the notion that the AP had a duty to obey the order to hold the story once it was clear the embargo was for political reasons, rather than to protect the troops.

"Once the war is over, you can't hold back information like that. The world needed to know," he said in an interview.

Rick Bowmer / AP

Julia Kennedy Cochran, daughter of former AP Paris bureau chief Ed Kennedy, points to her father in a picture taken during the German surrender in 1945, at her home in Bend, Ore.

Curley, who is retiring this year, has also co-written an introduction to Kennedy's newly published memoir, "Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship & The Associated Press."

Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963, had long sought such public vindication from his old employer. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, of Bend, Ore., said she was "overjoyed" by the apology.

"I think it would have meant a lot to him," she said.

The German surrender happened at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945.

No secrets at stake
Kennedy was one of 17 reporters taken to witness the ceremony. He and the others were hastily assembled by military commanders, then pledged to secrecy by a U.S. general while the group flew over France.

As a condition of being allowed to see the surrender in person, the correspondents were barred from reporting what they had witnessed until authorized by Allied headquarters. 

Initially, the journalists were told the news would be held up for only a few hours. But after the surrender was complete, the embargo was extended for 36 hours - until 3 p.m. the following day.

Kennedy was astounded.

"The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of such magnitude was too apparent," he would later write.

Nevertheless, he initially stayed quiet. Then, at 2:03 p.m., the surrender was announced by German officials, via a radio broadcast from Flensburg, a city already in Allied hands. That meant, Kennedy knew, that the transmission had been authorized by the same military censors gagging the press.

PhotoBlog: Funeral for French resistance hero Raymond Aubrac

Furious, Kennedy went to see the chief American censor and told him there was no way he could continue to hold the story. Word was out. The military had broken its side of the pact by allowing the Germans to announce the surrender. And there were no military secrets at stake.

The censor waved him off. Kennedy thought about it for 15 minutes, and then acted.

He used a military phone, not subject to monitoring by censors, to dispatch his account to the AP's London bureau. Notably, he didn't brief his own editors about the embargo or his decision to dodge the censors. The AP put the story on the wire within minutes.

NYT reporter 'browned off'
To some of Kennedy's competitors, the scoop was a betrayal on the scale of Pearl Harbor. Compounding their anger, military censors continued to refuse to allow any other news organization to send their own stories, meaning the AP would continue to have an exclusive for a day. 

"I am browned off, fed up, burnt up and put out," wrote Drew Middleton, a New York Times correspondent. He called the suppression of the story "the most colossal 'snafu' in the history of the war." His newspaper followed with an editorial chastising the AP for initially boasting of a historic "news beat."

"If it was a 'beat,'" the paper wrote, "it was one only because Mr. Kennedy's sixteen colleagues chose to stand by their commitments."

Rick Bowmer / AP

Julia Kennedy Cochran holds a picture taken during the German surrender in 1945, at her home in Bend, Ore.

Retribution was swift. The military briefly suspended the AP's ability to dispatch any news from the European theater. When that ban was lifted, more than 50 of Kennedy's fellow war correspondents signed a protest letter asking that it be reinstated. The military expelled Kennedy from France.

Condemnation also came from the AP's president at the time, Robert McLean.

"The Associated Press profoundly regrets the distribution on Monday of the report of the total surrender in Europe which investigation now clearly discloses was distributed in advance of authorization by Supreme Allied Headquarters," he said in a public statement on May 10.

The AP's general manager, Kent Cooper, said Kennedy should have conferred with his editors about the decision to publish. Later, he addressed a letter to the reporter saying that he had violated a "cardinal principle" of journalism by breaking a pledge to keep the surrender confidential.

"No employee of the Associated Press has the right to disregard what is defined by the source as a pledge of confidence, when he knows that those who meant to impose it still hold it to be in force," he said. 

'The AP surrender'
Other journalists defended Kennedy. In an essay in The New Yorker, published May 19, 1945, under the subhead "The AP Surrender," A.J. Liebling absolved Kennedy of breaking the "pledge" he had supposedly made aboard the aircraft flying to Reims. 

"Whether a promise extorted as this one was, in an airplane several thousand feet up, has any moral force is a question for the theologians," Liebling wrote. "I suppose that Kennedy should have refused to promise anything and thus made sure of missing an event that no newspaperman in the world would want to miss."

WWII vet's dog tags returned after 66 years

Wes Gallagher, the AP reporter who succeeded Kennedy in Europe and became the general manager after Cooper, strongly supported his colleague and believed he had done the right thing.

According to the memoir, Gallagher told Truman's successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower: "If I'd been Kennedy, I'd have done the same thing - except that I'd have telephoned you first."

After being fired by the AP, Kennedy took a job as managing editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press in California, and then went on to become publisher of the Monterey Peninsula Herald. He died at age 58 after being struck by an automobile.

Kennedy wrote the war memoir before his death. His family held on to the manuscript for decades before his daughter, Cochran, began looking for a publisher.

She said that even though she was only 16 when her father died, she got the impression he still took great joy in his career, despite the episode.

"Some people said after the war, 'Oh, Ed Kennedy is a broken man. He's out there editing some little newspaper in California.' I think people had this idea that he was feeling sorry for himself. But he wasn't. He wasn't the kind of person who sat around and felt sorry," she said.

Curley said Kennedy's daughter approached him around the same time he had become interested in the matter while helping with work on the book "Breaking News: How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else." The publication of Kennedy's memoir prompted the AP's apology, Curley said.

He called Kennedy's dismissal "a great, great tragedy" and hailed him and the desk editors who put the surrender story on the wire for upholding the highest principles of journalism.

"They did the right thing," Curley said. "They stood up to power."

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Yves Logghe / AP

Nurse Augusta Chiwy, left, talks with author and military historian Martin King moments before receiving an award for valor from the U.S. Army, in Brussels, Monday. (AP Photo/Yves Logghe)

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II was given a U.S. award for valor Monday — 67 years late.

Congolese-born Augusta Chiwy, now 93, received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service medal from U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman at a ceremony in the military museum in Brussels.

"She helped, she helped, and she helped," Gutman said at the ceremony. He said the long delay in presenting the award was because it was assumed that Chiwy had been killed when a bomb destroyed her hospital.

The Battle of the Bulge was a ferocious encounter in the final stages of World War II. In desperation, Adolf Hitler ordered a massive attack on allied forces in the Ardennes, in southern Belgium. More than 80,000 American soldiers were killed, captured or wounded.

Chiwy had volunteered to assist in an aid station in the town of Bastogne, where wounded and dying U.S. soldiers in their thousands were being treated by a single doctor in December 1944 and January 1945. Chiwy braved the gunfire, helping whoever she could, and saving the lives of hundreds of American GIs.

The Nazis hoped the surprise attack would reach the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut off the advancing allied armies. Bastogne, a market town that was also a critical road junction, was quickly besieged.

The U.S. troops — led by paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division — found themselves surrounded. But they resisted fiercely, and the key crossroads was never taken.

During the siege, Bastogne was heavily shelled and quickly reduced to ruins. Another Belgian nurse — Chiwy's friend Renee Lemaire — was killed along with about 30 patients when a bomb penetrated a cellar where she was tending to the wounded.

Gutman said the diminutive Chiwy combed battlefields during the battle, often coming under enemy fire, to collect the wounded in the deep snow.

"What I did was very normal," Chiwy said during the ceremony. "I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God."

But Col. J.P. McGee, who commands a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said that to the wounded soldiers Chiwy was "a goddess."

"Men lived and families were reunited due to your efforts," he said.

McGee said the army's doctor in Bastogne, John Prior, had joked that the German snipers couldn't hit Chiwy because she was so tiny. But Chiwy, who moved to Belgium from the colony of Congo before the war, responded that they were just bad shots.

McGee also gave Chiwy a letter of appreciation from Gen. David Petraeus, himself a former commander of the 101st Airborne.

After the battle, Chiwy slipped into obscurity, working as a hospital nurse treating spinal injuries. She married a Belgian soldier and had two children.

She was finally located several years ago by a British author and historian, Martin King, who had heard stories about a black nurse at Bastogne.