What a great tale LOO, I am very happy your persistence has paid off for you.
I use free automatic translators on Google, which provide a good base line to work from.
I am interested that you seem to have found so little of your family history on-line for so long.
It has been my experience that my German Protestant and Catholic lines were found easily on FamilySearch (free) and Ancestry (free during Covid crisis). Some records go back several hundred years!
There is far less on those sites for my Jewish Ancestors of course, as most digitising has worked from church records, but it is always worth searching there to start. More is put on-line regularly so it is worth running searches every few months.
I have made marvellous progress using: MyHeritage, the Arolson Archives, Yad Vashem, Geni, Mappingthelives and the American Holocaust Museum.