For more than 60 years, Micky Schwartz had no idea just how lucky he was to get a throat infection as a teenager at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The illness saved his life — an irony documented in Nazi war records that only now are being made publicly accessible.

Then a boy of 14, Schwartz's name was crossed off a list of young Hungarian Jews slated to be shipped to a Nazi weapons manufacturing plant. The camp, survivors had learned, was a virtual death sentence. Records kept by his captors show he was too sick to make the journey, according to Paul Shapiro.

Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, described Schwartz's journey through the hellish concentration camp system during the International Association for Jewish Genealogy Societies' annual meeting, being held at the Hilton City Center.

As the driving force behind efforts to gain public access to the largest closed database of World War II documents, Shapiro said records of more than 17 million people victimized by the Nazis will soon become available after a long series of diplomatic cajoling that has included representatives from 11 different countries who oversee the archive — known as the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

Digitized copies of one section of the German-held records are to arrive at the Holocaust Museum in Washington later this summer, and personnel there hope to begin searching the records for Holocaust survivors seeking information about family members before year's end.

Schwartz was one of three Jewish men whose visit to the German archive was documented late last year by a "60 Minutes" television segment describing efforts to open the ITS to the public before the last survivors of the Holocaust die. When shown the paper trail that included a line through his name on the list of prisoners to be shipped to the weapons plant, Schwartz was stunned, calling himself "Mr. Lucky."

His is one of literally millions of stories that will no doubt come to light once the ITS records are fully digitized and made searchable, a process that is now under way at the Holocaust Museum as well as other repositories around the world, including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.