PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) Alexa Dezsofi’s eyes raced across the documents and landed on a stunning fact: A man who shares her last name, in all likelihood a distant cousin and the sort of family she’d searched for, had actually survived one of history’s most notorious concentration camps, Dachau.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

For a few moments, it was all Alexa could utter, recalls Britany Schneider, the Oregon Red Cross worker sitting across from her that day. “Oh my God” — a mantra of surprise, a prayer laced with gratitude and hope.

Like so many around the world who are still searching for family lost to the chaos of World War II and the Holocaust, for Alexa, even one scrap of information felt like a gift. She found it with the help — of all groups — the Red Cross. And there in her hands was a treasure trove.

The documents brimmed with details about Andor Dezsofi, whom she’s nearly certain is her father’s second cousin. The forms, filled out in exacting, old-fashioned European script, indicate he was Jewish, spoke three languages, and had blond hair and blue eyes, just as her father remembers.

When the Nazis arrested him in 1944 and imprisoned him at Dachau, they listed his address as Budapest, Hungary, home to a distinguished line of Dezsofis dating to the 1600s.

Documents noted, too, that when U.S. troops liberated Dachau the following year, prisoner No. 122077, Andor Dezsofi, was among those freed.

If her cousin survived the Holocaust, the 21-year-old Dezsofi remembers thinking, he must have been strong to the core. What if, she wondered, he’s still alive?

Dezsofi long has known that World War II and the tumult that rocked Hungary toward revolution in 1956 wreaked havoc for her ancestors. Photos show her father, Laszlo Dezsofi, gaunt from hunger during childhood. At 74, he rarely speaks of those years. Yet “when he does talk,” she says, “I listen.”

She and her five siblings know that his elementary school class shrank in 1944, when the Nazis moved into Hungary. Children disappeared and he never saw them again.

In 1956, to escape Red Army troops, her father jumped from a moving train to escape to safety in Austria and make his way to the United States.

Dezsofi has always been intrigued by the missing puzzle pieces in her family history. Two years ago, after the birth of her daughter, she knew it was time to search for answers.

Her half sister, Alison, was interested, too, and followed leads online. But it was Alexa who spotted an article about the Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, an international effort to help discover the fate of the missing. Last April, she asked the center for help.

“I want to know what happened,” she says. “I want to be able to tell my child. I want her to know where she came from.”

The Red Cross has tracked victims of World War II and the Nazi regime since 1939, mining a labyrinth of records worldwide and, after the war, at the International Tracing Service archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, home to 50 million documents.

In 1990, the American Red Cross built an information clearinghouse in Baltimore — the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center — through which families have learned the fates of more than 43,000 loved ones; more than 1,600 victims have been reunited with family.

“We have a tagline: `Every answer is a gift,”‘ says Fern Winkler Schlesinger of Portland, who is on the tracing center’s national board of directors.

Survivors and their descendents often find closure and with it, peace, when they know for certain what became of a loved one.

Since 2007, the answers have arrived more swiftly. That year, workers at the vast German archive began digitizing documents — everything from camp rosters and transport manifests to records of people who fell ill and forms signed by prisoners en route to death camps. Searches that once took three years now turn up answers in as little as three weeks.

Typically, families learn that the war or Holocaust claimed their loved ones; Alexa discovered that 16 family members died in concentration camps, mostly at Auschwitz.

But sometimes what Winkler Schlesinger calls “miracles” happen, as with the case of a brother and sister reunited after each believed, for more than 60 years, that the other was dead. In fact, they lived only miles apart in Israel.

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Schneider, the Red Cross volunteer shepherding Alexa’s search, forwarded it to the national office, which sent it to the Hungarian Red Cross. Workers dug in, researching varied spellings of the family name.

They sifted through records of destroyed towns and those that stand, studying street names that changed over time. This past fall, the results landed on Schneider’s desk at the Red Cross office in North Portland. As she read the file, she says, “my heart just rose.”

Her Hungarian colleagues discovered that the Nazis arrested Andor Dezsofi in 1944 and sent him to Dachau. He worked in one of Dachau’s subsidiary camps, where conscripted laborers and prisoners built jet fighters and missiles for the Germans.

More than 200,000 prisoners were housed at Dachau and some 35,000 are believed to have died there or in the sub-camps. Documents show that when U.S. troops liberated Dachau in April 1945, Dezsofi was placed in Jewish custody. His identification tag was among the artifacts the Red Cross recovered.

“It’s a miracle that we don’t have any records of his death,” Schneider says. “Nine out of 10 times that’s what we get.”

Red Cross volunteers in Hungary, Austria, Poland, Germany and the United States continue to search for him, or perhaps a wife or children, if he had them. If successful, they’ll provide him or his relatives with Alexa’s contact information.

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If Andor Dezsofi is alive, he is 86 years old.

If he’s gone, the Red Cross may be able to give Alexa’s family a sacred bit of information: the date he died. Jews traditionally light a candle and pray on the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

She wasn’t raised in the faith, but once she learned about Andor, Alexa began to study its tenets and traditions.

In the small home where she and her toddler live, its walls warmed with family portraits dating back decades, something new graced the kitchen counter this holiday season: a menorah.

(Katy Muldoon writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)