Many have no concept of the Holocaust ever happening and how it could be that 6 million innocent people were murdered in cold blood, including 1.5 million children,” she said. “It was a physical and permanent manifestation of their memory,” Klaristenfeld said.īrandman said the impact of the monumental installation cannot be underestimated. Klaristenfeld navigated through the massive Book of Names at Auschwitz-Birkenau and found the names of his grandmother’s parents and other relatives. Brandman’s large immediate and extended families were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis. New Yorker Bronia Brandman, a child survivor of Auschwitz originally from Jaworzno, Poland, was similarly moved when she embarked on a “roots trip” with her grandson Sruli Klaristenfeld in April 2017. I believe that you cannot remain indifferent to such a huge display when you see it.”ĭayan said he first experienced the power of the installation when he traveled to Auschwitz to see its initial version and found the names of his father’s uncles who were murdered in Poland. “We have to find innovative ways to reflect on and educate about what happened. “Our mission will be much more challenging, but also much more important and vital,” Dayan said of the coming era when no survivors remain. In addition to the permanent installations at Auschwitz and Yad Vashem, there are plans for a third version of the book to be created as a traveling exhibition. The names in the book are sourced from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, which the institution has been collecting since 1954. The Book of Names is one component of Yad Vashem’s new strategic plan to improve and increase Holocaust remembrance in Israel and the world at a time when the number of survivors is dwindling and Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise, Dayan said. Only the names of those sent to slave labor there were registered on cards, and the Nazis destroyed most of these records.” At Auschwitz, 900,000, men, women and children were sent straight to their deaths. Similarly, there were only numerical reports of the Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen. “Hungarian transport lists had numbers, but not names - and they were all taken to extermination sites. “Few ghettos had censuses or name registrations,” noted Avram. The special team that finds the names and archives them in Yad Vashem’s names database is challenged by the fact that the Nazis either tried to eliminate traces of their crimes against humanity by destroying records, or never registered Jews’ names in the first place - especially in Eastern Europe. We have also sourced hundreds of thousands of names from our own collections.” “These include lists of victims produced by federal archives or organizations in different countries, deportation lists compiled by researchers and museums, and names gathered by memorial sites and institutions. “Starting about 20 years ago, we have been able to go beyond these pages and look to thousands of other sources for names,” Avram continues. The Pages of Testimony are one-page forms that survivors and remaining family and friends complete with the names and biographical information of the victims. “We have been collecting the names of the individual Holocaust victims since 1954, mainly through Pages of Testimony,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. The names in the Book are sourced from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. The book has blank pages at the end symbolizing the approximately 1 million victims whose names are not yet recorded. The massive volume lists the names of the victims in alphabetical order and, where the information is known, includes their birth dates, hometowns and places of death. The new version, which contains 500,000 additional names, stands 6.5 feet high and approximately 3.3 feet wide. The installation is an updated version of the Yad Vashem Book of Names that has been on permanent display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland since 2017. Afterward it will be transferred to its permanent location at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, where it will be open to public viewing in time for Yom HaShoah, the Israeli and Jewish Holocaust remembrance day, in April. ![]() ![]() The Book of Names will be on display at the United Nations for a month. Each one who died deserves to be remembered as an individual, and not only as part of a nameless collective,” Dayan said. “The Shoah was the murder of 6 million individual Jews.
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