What’s in a Name – The Campaign Goes on

By Daniel J. Chalfen

Chana Piotrovska. Murdered in Treblinka in 1942

“In Germany recently, a teacher, who is also a priest, asked his pupils as a class project to gather the names of Jews killed during the Holocaust in their locality. This private initiative that greatly assists Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names collection process is incredible, yet not unique.

In January of this year, twelve-year-old Ben Wind from San Antonio, Texas, USA, wrote to Yad Vashem to request 200 blank Pages of Testimony. He explained that for his Bar Mitzvah project, he intends to collect survivor testimonies for Yad Vashem. “I plan to hand deliver all of the forms that are returned to me to Yad Vashem, when I come to Jerusalem this June for my Bar Mitzvah,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Ron Haber from New Zealand was so moved by his visit to Yad Vashem last May that he took back home with him Pages of Testimony for his grandfather, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, to fill in. Ron’s grandfather passed away the following September and in his honor, Ron, some classmates, and a teacher from their Jewish school collected testimonies from all the Holocaust survivors in New Zealand and then forwarded them to Yad Vashem.

Yet another private initiative to collect testimonies from Holocaust survivors came from the Centro Recordatorio del Holocausto in Montevideo, Uruguay. The results of this project, some 1,200 Pages of Testimony, were handed to Yad Vashem upon completion.

The Hall of Names also recently received a manuscript, forty years in the making, which chronicles the names of Jews who resided in small numbers in 54 tiny villages in Hungary. The author, serving as a soldier in Ukraine during World War Two, saw many Jews working in the forced labor units of the Hungarian army and witnessed their maltreatment. After the war, he realized that no Jews returned to his home region, and he felt an impulse to do something to honor their memory. The result is this monumental piece of work that adds so much to Yad Vashem’s persistent struggle to gather the names of victims in order to commemorate their lives.

In this way, Yad Vashem continues to collect names, an immense campaign that was first launched in 1954-55 and is sporadically revitalized, most markedly on the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a result of this past year’s renewed collection campaign, 350,000 more names have been added to the Hall of Names where more than three million names have been gathered and computerized.  Alexander Avraham, Director of the Hall of Names, hopes that eventually almost five million names will be recorded. Yad Vashem re-launched the effort this Holocaust Remembrance Day. “With each name added,” he believes “the memory of a whole life is revived. Every new name recorded in the Hall of Names is yet another small victory against oblivion.”

“A name represents the identity of a person,” explains Alexander. “A name is not chosen randomly; each has a specific etymology, a certain meaning. Sometimes, a name even represents the personality of the person.”

“We are attempting to reconstruct the identity of people. To talk about names, is to talk about real people, not just anonymous victims. As soon as a person is referred to by name, one can begin to connect to a personality, to family background, beliefs, geographical and often socio-religious origins.”

Although the primary task of Alexander and his staff is to gather names in order to memorialize all the victims, the purpose of the effort is certainly not solely in the interest of developing lists. Quite the contrary, besides commemoration the operation also aims to add a new aspect to Holocaust education and academia. This subject was addressed at the Recording the Names conference held at Yad Vashem in early March.

The expressed purpose of the conference was to show how the data collected by the Hall of Names can be used across the disciplines, and how it represents a dynamic resource. Participating in the conference were demographers, genealogists, etymologists, economists, sociologists, and historians. Each participant sought to discover how the archived names are not just symbolic gravestones, but represent a dimension of individuality and persona regarding those who perished. Names alone can impart information pertaining to social status, profession, level of religiosity, geographical origins of the family and much more.

A practical workshop, which took place on the second day of the conference, was dedicated to the future development of the computerized databank of Holocaust victims’ names. Representatives of twelve different institutions in Europe and the USA among them Terezinsnka Iniciativa, the Auschwitz Museum, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, convened for the second time in three years in Jerusalem to discuss the progress of their respective names computerization projects and the ways to integrate them with Yad Vashem’s central databank.

Now that Yad Vashem has succeeded in computerizing the files of the Hall of Names and has almost perfected the retrieval system that allows easier access to archived information, this resource is available to a wider audience. The campaign for the collection of Holocaust victims’ names continues vigorously, and now, especially, with the development of this additional aspect of the project, the importance of the efforts of the staff at the Hall of Names has been justly recognized.