Recording Holocaust History

From USA Today:
"Historians race clock to collect Holocaust survivor stories"

Zvi Shefel recalled the day the German army arrived at his Polish town of Slonim in the summer of 1942. The soldiers immediately began mass exterminations and eventually killed more than 25,000 Jews, including his mother, father and sister. There is nothing in that town that Shefel, 86, can find about his family, he said while attending the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Thursday for the "Day of Remembrance" commemoration of the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide of World War II. "I've visited all the archives in Belarus to find the names of people, but they weren't there because the archives of Slonim were burned by the Germans when they retreated — but we have to keep the memory of what happened in order to never forget," he said. The annual remembrance was observed in Poland and other nations as well, and it took on special meaning this year to historians who are trying urgently to collect the remaining testimonies of eyewitnesses as their numbers dwindle. One survivor dies in Israel every hour, according to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, a non-profit group based in Tel Aviv that helps care for needy survivors. Today, there are 198,000 survivors in Israel; 88% are 75 or older. Israel's Yad Vashem memorial contains the largest archive in the world of historic material related to the Holocaust — or Shoah, as it is known in Hebrew — and it has been intensifying its campaign to record the accounts of survivors. Teams of historians have been dispatched to interview elderly survivors in their homes and collect artifacts. Since its establishment in 1953, Yad Vashem, an Israeli governmental authority, has collected 400,000 photographs, recorded roughly 110,000 victims' video testimonies and amassed 138 million pages of documents on the Nazis' genocide of Jews in Europe. It was after the Holocaust that the United Nations approved in 1947 what many Jews had sought for decades: a permanent homeland in what is now modern Israel. On Thursday, thousands of young people from Israel, the USA and other nations marched between the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau to honor the millions of Jewish dead. Despite the immense scholarship on the Holocaust, many unknowns remain, including the identities of roughly one-third of the Jewish victims. In 1955, Israel began creating a page of testimony for each victim, and by 2004, Yad Vashem had 3 million names when it first uploaded the names database to the Internet. Survivors have since added pictures and scanned letters to the victims' individual pages in what have become "virtual tombstones." At the end of last year, 4.1 million names had been recovered, Wroclawski said. "We are trying to find them by name, which is an expression of an individual's identity. The Nazis tried to exterminate not only the people but every memory of the individual and strip away their humanity and any memory of them," Wroclawski said.

^ Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel (most of the world remembers the Holocaust in January when Auschwitz was liberated whereas Israel remembers the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.) I think it is very important to record the stories of each survivor that is living now - I was shocked to learn that a survivor dies everyday in Israel. Each Holocaust survivor experienced different things and has a unique story to tell that helps piece together the Holocaust as a whole. I also think it is important to try and name the victims - even if there is no grave. Most of the latter part has only been going on the past 20 years since Communism in Eastern Europe and the Iron Curtain fell. Even though the Holocaust happened over 60 years ago it is still a very relevent part of our current history. Even though many survivors are dying everyday there are still many grandparents and great-parents alive that continue to shape their family's lives.
I remember the first time I "officially" learned about the Holocaust. I was in 7th grade in Germany and we read "The Diary of Anne Frank." She was around my age and I was living in the same country she was born in (and would later die in) and the same one that started World War 2 and the Holocaust. Of course I have a very different view - after working at the Holocaust Museum and learning more first-hand - than I did back then, but what I really remember is that after reading about Anne Frank the Holocaust wasn't just about milions upon millions of people. There was a face, a name and a story. I think that by identifying the victims more stories will be written that will continue to put pictures and faces together so people today will be able to understand the Holocaust better - in a more humanistic way rather than a scholarally approach. ^

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-18/Holocaust-remembrance-survivors/54414332/1