Museum racing to ID each Holocaust victim

JERUSALEM | Motivated by the principle that “every victim has a name,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum has identified nearly 4 million Jews who lost their lives to Nazi Germany’s genocide and is trying to identify the rest while survivors are still alive.

“We are in a race against time,” said American-born Cynthia Wroclawski, outreach manager of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project. “Our mission is to reach people who have information.”

Ms. Wroclawski said 3.6 million names - just over half the estimated Jewish death toll - have been registered to date.

The monumental task began in 1955, two years after Yad Vashem was established by Israel’s parliament, and accelerated in the 1990s in part because of technical advancements such as the creation of a computerized database.

Once completed, the list could help put to rest arguments over whether the death toll has been inflated for political reasons, such as to justify the creation of the modern Jewish state.

Although the number of Jews who perished in Nazi death camps from gas, firing squads, medical experimentation, illness or malnutrition is commonly given as 6 million, analysts differ on the precise figure.

Jacob Lestchinsky, the demographer who calculated the death toll immediately after the end of World War II, concluded that there were 5.95 million Jewish victims. Raul Hilberg, a U.S.-based historian, put it at 5.1 million. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimated that between 5.59 million and 5.86 million died, and Wolfgang Benz, a German scholar, says the range is between 5.29 million and 6 million.

Most of Yad Vashem’s data have been drawn from the “pages of testimony” given by Holocaust survivors and others who have evidence that their relatives or friends were killed by the Nazis from the inception of Adolf Hitler’s regime in January 1933 to the end of World War II in May 1945.

Ms. Wroclawski cited an example of the kind of evidence that has been compiled.

“In 1941, David Berger, an electrician who was 21 years old at the time, sent a letter from occupied Lithuania, to his girlfriend who had managed to reach Palestine saying, ‘I would like someone to remember that there lived a person named David Berger,’ ” she said.

Major international archives, such as that of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, have hardly been tapped. Its files contain the names of 50 million people, most of them non-Jews, who perished in Nazi death camps or worked as slave laborers.

Until two years ago, the archive was off-limits, except to Holocaust survivors. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was given custody of the records in 1955 - a decade after they were collected by U.S. and British troops by order of the Allied military command - did not let historians, other researchers or lawyers examine the material.

In 1958, the ICRC did allow a team from Yad Vashem and the Israeli Foreign Ministry to microfilm almost all of the documents that pertain to Jews. The excluded material - about 5 percent of the data - related to “kapos,” inmates used by SS guards to control the prisoners - as well as purported informers, thieves and other supposed deviants.

Ms. Wroclawski estimates that it will take two more years for the digitization process to be completed. At that point, she said, it should be possible to find the names of most of the Holocaust’s victims.

Moshe Zimmermann of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, a renowned scholar of German history and of the German-Jewish community in particular, said that estimate was far too optimistic.

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