by Dana Porath

“I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.”
David Berger, in his last letter, before being murdered by the Nazis in Vilna in 1941—quoted on the homepage of Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names

“Dear David,
I do remember that you once lived and every day I try to be the person you would have liked me to be.
You would have probably made a better job of it than me but I have a good wife and a very special son and I love them as much as I am sure they love me.
I did not become famous or become a renowned academic or musician but many of us did and we have given our best to our world but more than that we have become good and decent human beings.
You would be proud of our Israel and you would have enjoyed the warm sun on your body and the food that we grow in our own land and the tall straight trees that are testimony to our endurance.
I wish I could have shown you a better life and I hope that you would at least have liked me and my friends.
I will not forget you David, and I will make sure no one ever will, till we meet again.”
Philip Morrison, Glasgow, Scotland (by e-mail to Yad Vashem, January 2005)

By the end of March this year, just four months after the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names—containing close to three million names of Holocaust victims—was launched on Yad Vashem’s website, over four million people had visited the site. An average of seven thousand new Pages of Testimony a month have been submitted—six times the monthly number received until then. The overwhelming interest this historic event has sparked throughout the world has exceeded all expectations. Across five continents, both national and international media have displayed a steady disclosure of human emotion, mass interest and personal accounts that has helped put Holocaust remembrance squarely in the forefront of worldwide discourse.

In the United Kingdom, Yad Vashem partnered with Tribe (The Young United Synagogue) on the innovative “Sixty Days for Sixty Years” educational project, marking 60 years since the end of the Holocaust. From 25 January to 25 March 2005 (60 days), people of all age groups and backgrounds studied various topics about Jewish identity in the modern age including the Holocaust, each in the memory of a specific individual Shoah victim. Participants, such as Philip Morrison from Glasgow (quoted above), were encouraged to access the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names on the site to investigate the lives of those individuals whose memories they commemorated. They also helped collect names within their families and communities of those not yet memorialised on the Database.

Multitudes of people have contacted Yad Vashem, expressing their appreciation for the tremendous efforts involved in uploading the Database, and hundreds of visitors to the website have discovered information about new or lost family members through contacting those who submitted the Pages of Testimony over the past 50 years. One of the most moving stories was that of two sisters who were reunited after more than six decades after the granddaughter of one of the sisters conducted a search on the Database.

Klara Blaier, 81, and Hannah Katz, 78, were born to the Weiss family in a village near the town of Mukachevo (better known as Munkacs by the Jewish community that once flourished there) in what was then Czechoslovakia. After the war broke out, their parents sent them to different relatives in Hungary. They last saw each other in 1944, after the Nazis occupied Hungary. Both survived camps and death marches, made aliya in 1948 and raised families just 45 miles apart. Both thought they were the only survivors from their families.

In January, Hannah Katz’s granddaughter Merav Zamir decided to check if the Page of Testimony she submitted in 1999 for her great grandmother Sheindl Weiss (on behalf of her grandmother) was there. To her surprise, she found that besides her own, there was another Page of Testimony for Sheindl Weiss submitted by her daughter Klara Blaier in 1993. As far as Merav knew, her grandmother had no surviving siblings. She immediately contacted Yad Vashem, who then assisted the families in making contact.

After 61 years, Klara and Hannah were finally reunited. In a newspaper interview, Merav said: “When I visited Auschwitz my life changed… my whole outlook was transformed. Now my life has changed again. I want to tell people never to give up—continue the search.”

The author is the Content Manager the Yad Vashem Website