Helen Segall doesn’t remember what she said to her father. She can’t find the words. But she remembers other details, like how warm the August sun felt shining down that day as her father sat with his arm around her near the cellar entrance.

Maybe they were saying goodbye. Maybe they were saying “I love you.” Maybe they were sitting quietly, like fathers and daughters sometimes do.

It is a tiny hole in the greater fabric of Ms. Segall’s childhood memories, a blank she is unable to fill.

“What I do remember is a man with no face, a man — and I would learn this later — who was a local Ukrainian schutzmann, a Nazi collaborator, and actually wearing a mask because they wouldn’t want to be recognized when they came for my father,” Ms. Segall says.

She was a carefree Jewish kid in Dubno, Poland, when the Germans came to town in 1941. Her father, Hersh, was taken with his two brothers, a brother-in-law and scores of other Jewish men to the local prison. They were beaten before being marched to the Jewish cemetery where they forced to dig their own graves before being shot.

“My mother went to the cemetery the next day,” Ms. Segall says. “The graves were still heaving because not everybody was dead. The blood was running in a great stream. They only killed men that day.

“That’s when the horrors really began for us.”

Her story of Dubno is among the thousands of entries in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II, an exhaustive new tome intended to document the exhaustive nature of a Holocaust that was far greater in scope than the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have scoured Eastern European archives and sought out survivor testimonials in an effort to account for every grisly act perpetrated by the Germans.

Their efforts offer some fresh revelations from a well-tilled scholarly field, such as the extent of the ghetto system the Nazis employed in Poland and parts beyond to corral Jews before killing them, often on a mass scale, often by machine-gunning them in pits on the outskirts of whatever place they once called home.

“[The book] gives us information about ghettos that would slip into historical oblivion and be forgotten forever,” Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer says. “Who knew there were more than 1,000 ghettos?”

Less than 10% of Eastern European ghetto dwellers survived the war. Ms. Segall is one of them. Her voice, at 81, is rich with life as she speaks from her home in Wayne, Pa.

Her father’s death was just a warning shot, she says. There were greater evils to be visited upon Dubno’s Jews. The Germans ghettoized them, further subdividing the Jews into two groups: those that could work and those that were too old or too young to.

“When the ghetto was formed, my grandparents’ house was part of the ghetto wall,” she says.

“The windows were boarded up and an ugly fence built between my grandparents’ house and the house next door. I remember the day it was built. I was peering through a crack, watching people walk by — nobody looked. Nobody cared.”

There were other humiliations, like having to wear a yellow Star of David or stepping off the sidewalk whenever a German approached because Jews didn’t deserve to share the same ground. The lilacs were blooming the day they came for her maternal grandparents, two aunts, countless cousins and friends.

Ms. Segall begged her mother, Charna, to run, to escape. She was only 11 but could hear the adults talking at night, speaking of the unspeakable horrors happening all around. Information kept trickling in from other towns. The Germans’ intentions were clear.

Charna bought forged papers. Mother and daughter vanished into the countryside, disappearing from their work detail. They were blond, fluent in several languages and familiar with the Lord’s Prayer, a handy piece of New Testament knowledge especially for two runaway Jews posing as peasant refugees seeking shelter among other good Christians.

“I knew ‘Our Father’ in Ukrainian, Polish and Russian — whatever the occasion required,” Ms. Segall says.

She remembers scavenging apple cores and sugar beets from near-barren fields. The beets would burn in her stomach. She remembers a woman’s arm, not her face, just her arm, extended from a window, holding a bean pie for them to take.

These were the small mercies, the acts of kindness. Eventually, hiding places became impossible to find. Getting caught sheltering Jews — even unwittingly — was a death sentence. Ms. Segall was separated from her mother in the shuffle between safe havens and arrived in the town of Mizocz, and another ghetto, with her aunt Natalie. The 300-year-old town was annihilated over two days in October 1942.

Ghetto residents set Mizocz ablaze in an effort to create confusion and provide cover for escape. Helen and Natalie hid in an outhouse by the river.

When they were discovered, the little girl with the blond hair began talking, explaining in rapid-fire Polish how they were Poles and had come to trade with the Jews and been trapped by the mayhem.

Her chatter earned them a temporary reprieve and a night in the Gestapo prison.

“It was a scene out of Kafka, a real nightmare,” Ms. Segall says.

“There was a father whose six-year-old child had been shot and was bleeding from the stomach. He was trying to strangle her to put her out of her misery. His wife had become insane. We knew them, and yet pretended we didn’t.

“Another man gave me a piece of bread which I shared with my aunt. It was the most cherished morsel of bread I have ever eaten. In the morning everybody was led out of the prison and put in front of the Gestapo man.

“He was standing on the steps looking down at us. My aunt showed him her documents. He didn’t even look at them. He gestured for us to take our kerchiefs [off our heads], which we did, and he said. ‘Leave. Go.’ So we went.

“When I speak at schools and students ask me how I survived, I tell them I had blond hair and I liked to talk.”

Ms. Segall is retired from a career talking as a professor of Russian studies at Dickinson College in Wayne, Pa. She has had made five trips to Dubno over the years retracing old steps, revisiting old horrors — and happier times — while piecing together the fragments of her past.

Each visit is a reminder of the staggering enormity of the crimes committed there, and across Europe, a systematic evil of encyclopedic breadth that is impossible to comprehend even for a little blond Jewish girl who witnessed it.

“I still keep my hair blond,” Ms. Segall says. “It is part of who I am. I am very attached to it.”

National Post, with files from The Associated Press (© 2012 National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. 05/13/12)