Two relatives of Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic front-runner for president, were seized in 1942 by the Nazis and killed in the Holocaust, according to new information unearthed by Vienna genealogist, Felix Gundacker. That's surprising, but touching news to the Massachusetts politican with a Catholic upbringing and an Irish name.

Senator Kerry first learned the extent of his Jewish roots a year ago when the Vienna genealogist, hired by The Boston Globe to research Kerry's roots, discovered that Kerry's paternal grandfather Frederick, a converted Catholic born to Jewish parents in what was Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic), changed his name from Fritz Kohn to Frederick Kerry before emigrating to the United States in 1905.

New findings posted to the genealogist's Web site on Sunday, show that the Nazis killed two of Ida Lowe's siblings -- a sister in the Treblinka concentration camp, and a brother in Theresienstadt, a Czechoslovakian ghetto that held Jews before they were taken to camps.

"I'm very touched by the knowledge that one of my relatives was in the Holocaust," Kerry said in an interview with Newsday. "It gives an even greater personal sense of connection [to the Holocaust] that is very real and very touching. It makes you wonder how horrible their lives must have been."