Putting names to the ‘missing million’

Researchers in Jerusalem are rushing to put names to more than one million unidentified victims of the Holocaust before survivors and family members who knew them die.

It is a phenomenon that BBC News dubbed “the missing million” in a report on Monday: More than one million of the Holocaust’s six million murdered Jews are still unknown, due mostly to scant record-keeping at Nazi death camps.

Staff at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, have recorded 4.7 million names and biographies of Jews killed in the Holocaust — leaving about 1.3 million unaccounted for. The decades-long name-recovery project is an act of defiance against the Nazi intent “to dehumanize the Jews, turn them into numbers, murder them and systematically obliterate every memory of them,” the centre’s website says.

Since the 1950s, Yad Vashem researchers have scoured archives for names of victims and have collected more than 2.5 million “pages of testimony,” single-page forms detailing the personal details of a victim, filled out by a Holocaust survivor, a descendent or friend. Each tells a person’s story, about where they were born, who they married, what they did and how they died. But with the pool of people who knew victims shrinking drastically, Yad Vashem is fearful some of the victims won’t ever be identified.

“These people are dying out,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s sobering Hall of Names, which holds the pages of testimony. “We won’t be able to access the information they have in their minds.”

Yad Vashem is faced with coaxing aging Holocaust survivors into speaking about who they lost — a difficult task, Avram said, considering some “never wanted to touch the subject.”

The other major hurdle is the child victims, he said, since in many circumstances the surviving family members did not live in close proximity. “Members of the family don’t remember the names of small children,” Avram said. “Cousins who lived 60 kilometres away never knew those newborns.”

Yad Vashem gets calls from children or grandchildren of survivors, asking, ‘Maybe you can talk to my grandfather and convince them,’ ” Avram said. In those cases, the museum can dispatch one of its volunteers around the world to make a house-call and help fill in a page of testimony.

Vera Schiff, the Torontobased author and Holocaust survivor, filled out around two dozen pages of testimony for family members in 1999, including her parents, Siegfried and Elsa Katz, and her older sister Eva, who died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

“I thought I should leave this evidence behind,” she told the Post on Monday. “For me they are not just names, there are faces behind these names.

“It’s all etched into your memory: their faces, they will always be there.”