MIAMI, FL – Paul Gast last saw his mother when he was 14 years old – war is a nasty thing.

Like so many other children affected by World War II, Mr. Gast was separated from his family in 1944 when Nazis marched into Poland and shipped Jews to ghettos or to concentration camps where millions were murdered.

Mr. Gast was fortunate to be among the survivors liberated by the United States Army, but he never knew his mother’s fate until he contacted the International Tracing Services of the American Red Cross Greater Miami & The Keys, which on World Red Cross Red Crescent day on May 8 joins 185 other Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in commemorating the 150th birthday of Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

Because of Mr. Dunant’s vision, many sister Red Cross and Red Crescent societies work together to complete countless tracing requests to find information on family members affected by the holocaust or families separated by conflicts in other parts of the globe.

In Miami, volunteers listened as Mr. Gast told his story from the rebuilding of his life after being freed from the death camp Auschwitz to receiving an education in England and moving to the U.S. to start a family of his own.

But the one thing he wanted most now, 60 years after being torn away his parents and his country, was to know what happened to his mother.

“After retirement, I have been more conscious of my past, of the loss of my parents and of my family” Mr. Gast explains. “I dream about my mother, my parents. I dream about my grandparents. I dream of talking to my mother and father. It’s just difficult, very difficult.”

It helped that Mr. Gast knew a lot of the important details – including his mother’s maiden name and date of birth – volunteers needed this information in order to process his tracing request quickly, and more importantly to match the records associated with the right person.

“For some people using our tracing requests, they want to know exactly where a family member ended up,” said Limor Schwartz, an American Red Cross Greater Miami & The Keys volunteer who helped run Mr. Gast’s tracing request. “If they can get the date of their death, it’s a big deal in the Jewish faith.”

Soon, Mr. Gast’s request for information made its way to the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victim Tracing Center in Baltimore and then to the Red Cross Society in Poland, which has a large repository of records produced by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Moving ever closer to the answers he’d be longing for, Mr. Gast, also became empowered for the first time to speak to university students about his experiences during the Holocaust and the effort he made to live a full life despite having gone through such a terrible time in history.

“Many survivors talk about the past,” Mr. Gast said. “I talk about the future. I tell them about what’s going on in the world and that younger generations must do something to prevent other atrocities from happening, such as what is happening now in Darfur.”

A year after submitting his request, Mr. Gast was asked to return to the American Red Cross Greater Miami & The Keys. Documents bearing his mother’s name had surfaced.

While the date of birth on German records were a year off, Mr. Gast suspects his mother fibbed so she would be spared from the gas chambers.

“The Germans kept terrific records,” Mr. Gast said. “She died of a heart attack on December 23, 1945 at 10 a.m. and she was cremated. In a way, I’m happier she died a natural death.

“I’m grateful for the help of the Red Cross. It put me at ease knowing the day and hour she died,” Mr. Gast said.