PEABODY - Sonia Weitz hopes to have a simple dream come true - to see something she hasn't seen in more than 60 years, her father's face.

That might not sound like much, but Weitz is a survivor of World War II's Holocaust, a Nazi movement to murder Jewish people. In fact, they not only killed Weitz' mother and father - they attempted to obliterate any trace of them, any letters, any keepsakes, any photos. Like most survivors, when Weitz emerged from the war, the only images of loved ones she retained were the images she could hold in her mind's eye.

"Everything was destroyed," she says. "There was nothing."

Finding some way to reconstruct the past - however imperfectly - can bring some healing.

"I would like anything at all," Weitz says. "A photo. Or a birth certificate. An ID card."

Now, though decades have passed, Weitz, 78, has new hope that she will see her father's face again. Ironically, the brutal efficiency of the Nazis, who meticulously recorded everything including their own crimes, might make this possible.

The Red Cross is seeking a photo of Weitz's father, Jacob Schreiber, that they believe exists in archives in Krakow, Poland. This is happening in the midst of a dramatic announcement that other long-hidden Nazi documents relating to slave labor and concentration camps, millions of papers recording 17 million lives, will be open for some public inspection.

Until now records stored in the central German town of Bad Arolsen have been closed to everyone except Red Cross workers conducting searches for missing relatives. It's said to be the largest collection of Nazi documents in existence. Opening it offers historians, survivors and, increasingly, the descendants of survivors, the hope of reconstructing more of the world the Nazis tried to destroy, rescuing the memory of people they had hoped to erase from the earth.

While Weitz is celebrating the breakthrough, she hasn't been waiting idly. She first hunted down a photo of her mother in 1963 on a visit to Israel.

"It was from someone I know who survived by escaping Poland when the Nazis came in, and going to the Soviet Union," she says.

Communist Russia proved no haven, and this Jewish family was soon packed off to a camp in Siberia.

In one of many small miracles, they managed to keep together a cache of photos - precious images including both Weitz's mother and grandmother. In an era when having your picture taken was serious business, a youthful Adela Finder Schreiber stares solemnly into the camera. The wear and tear on the much-traveled print envelopes her in a mist of white, but she is clearly visible, her expression haunting, as if she sees the future.

"She died in Belzec," Weitz says. "One of the real death camps in Poland." Virtually no one who went in survived. "We don't know if she suffered." She tries to believe that her mother died quickly.

Jacob Schreiber's death was witnessed by Weitz' brother-in-law, Norbert.

"He was killed by the capo," Weitz says, referring to a guard. "One day my father was too sick to work. So the capo decided to kill him."

He was beaten with a club, she says, adding, "To make sure he was dead they dumped him in a barrel of water."

The teenage Weitz, her sister Blanca, and Norbert were the only family members to emerge alive. Weitz survived five camps, including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. Sometime after the war the sisters calculated that they'd lost 84 family members.

Looking for a photograph

Now, thanks to the efforts of the American and Polish Red Cross, Weitz has learned of a second photo of her mother. Regina Szwadzka, director of Information Services at the Red Cross in Boston, helped obtain it. The Polish-born Szwadzka is part of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross. "A dynamic woman," says an admiring Weitz.

The photo of Sonia's mother, Szwadzka says, is from an identity document. Attached to it was a tiny image with a staple through the face. But its significance extends beyond the photo - "We believe," Szwadzka says, "if they have had her mother they will have her father." The prospect has excited Weitz.

"I don't know if we have for every one a photo," Szwadzka says. It's a hit-and-miss process. Documents are available in Krakow, but Warsaw, for example, was leveled during the war and most papers went with it. Nevertheless, workers in Poland, painstakingly searching the records, are highly motivated, she says.

"It's people who love to do the job," says Szwadzka. "Most have been working for 20 or more years. ... It's so powerful and so meaningful to people."

Even as survivors die out, searchers have found children and grandchildren tugging at their sleeves, Szwadzka says. Many grew up in homes where the past was not discussed by wounded parents, and they hunger for information.

"We will do this for free," continues Szwadzka, who grew up in Poland in the 1950s, hearing all around her stories of missing relatives and desperate pleas from those seeking lost loved ones. "The need is very great. They were deprived of the history of their pasts."

Szwadzka grew determined to help Weitz after reading her poem "Victory," about her last dance with her father. "The ugly barracks disappeared/There was no hunger ... and no fear."

"I said, 'You guys (in Poland) have to find the picture.'"

The effort to find a photo of Jacob Schreiber remains, so far, separate from the opening of the long-guarded wartime archives in Germany. Weitz, however, conveyed a note of regret when she wonders why that release took so long.

"It's about time," she says. (One excuse - the privacy of the victims. Another, the tendency of the Nazis to include in the records malicious libels against their victims.)

In the years since the war, here in America, Weitz has written a memoir of her experiences, "I Promised I Would Tell." She also founded the Holocaust Center Boston North and served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Commission.

She speaks so eagerly, so eloquently about all this that it's easy to forget how personal it is, how deep the memories cut. Until one day she stops in mid-sentence and says, "I talk about it and write about it and then I myself am wondering if the public is hearing what I'm saying." She pauses. "They say time heals all wounds. I'm not so sure." She pauses again. "It makes it a little easier."

Regina Szwadzka urges anyone seeking to learn about relatives lost in World War II to call the Red Cross at 617-274-5330, or write to the American Red Cross, Holocaust Tracing, 139 Main St., Cambridge, MA, 02142.