Student Profile: Luba Lola Herszenberg

I'm very glad to hear how excited you are! It is quite thrilling when you stumble on more information that confirms or expands upon what you knew before.

Sadly, JewishGen works off the same database that we do, so the information that appears to be confirmed is actually the same information. However, you've raised some pretty good questions, so I want to answer those:
-To the unasked question about using databases to confirm: take all information with a grain of salt, since, again, there's always the possibility for typos, transcription errors, transliteration differences, etc. That said, I do think the Gitla/Guta question might have been cleared up by the cross-check, as well as the issue of Luba's date of birth, since these were already questionable. I would want to see one more confirming source before we go ahead with either, but I'm more convinced now that they're correct.
-Address vs. ghetto house: might be a distinction JewishGen uses in its organization of the information; either way, they're both street addresses in Lodz at which Abram lived at some point during the period in which the records were taken. As you suspect, it is possible that one is the address before the move into the ghetto; it is also possible that the date of the change of address was irrelevant to the purpose of why the data was being collected.
-Manipulant: doesn't mean a manipulator (as in someone who is manipulative), but rather might have meant a mechanic or another form of technical job. (There's really no good English equivalent for the German, unfortunately.)
-Gitla on the student list: she may well be, we just don't know yet. We estimate that 14,000 students signed the album, from about thirty different schools (closer to 40-45 if you count, say, 13a and 13b as different schools). Here on the tech side at USHMM, we add names to the project for you all to research by school (ie, we've recently added everyone who signed for schools 5, 7a, 13b, etc.), but not until we can confirm a general age range for the students who attended that school, which we usually do by tracking down class lists for each school for 1940-1941. Since the process to get any school list prepared to go on the website is pretty labor-intensive, we've so far only put eight or so schools' worth of names up for research. I encourage you to keep up with the project after Professor Gamber's class, if you like, to see if Gitla (or Guta or G.) Herszenberg does show up in another class list.

I commend you for your attention to detail, your perserverance, your inquisitive spirit, and your enthusiasm in looking for and discovering new data and new ways to interpret it. This was a fascinating comment. Please keep up the excellent work.

I agree with you about Luba's mother and father (although I do want to know more about Abram's address and birthdate conflicts we uncovered in stage 1!), but I'm a bit iffier on the twins. Gitla and Guta, listed with the same birthdate in this database, could be twins--or could be the same person, and we could be looking at a transcription error from a handwritten document. (Try writing Gitla and Guta in cursive; an overextended stroke across the T might lead someone typing up the handwritten document to read "Git" as "Gut," or vice versa.) The Herszenberg story gets more interesting the more you find out--I'm really interested to see what happens as you track the family through the next stages of research.