| Every Victim Has A Name |
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By Jay Bushinsky She cited an example of the "mission" to which Yad Vashem is dedicated: "In 1941, David Berger. An electrician, who was 21 years old at the time, sent a letter from Occupied Lithuania, to his girlfriend who had managed to reach Palestine (now Israel), saying, 'I would like someone to remember that there lived a person named David Berger.' Asked whether the "moral obligation" to collect the names of Holocaust victims also would provide an effective rebuttal to those who deny that the Holocaust occurred or say that it affected relatively few Jewish victims, Wroclawski replied in the negative. "Yad Vashem does not argue with Holocaust deniers," she said. Although the number of Jews who were gassed in the Nazi death camps, asphyxiated in mobile death vans, killed by firing squads or other lethal means commonly is given as six million, experts differ about the precise figure. Raul Hilberg, a U.S.-based historian puts it at 5.1 million. The late Jacob Lestchinsky, the demographer who calculated the death toll immediately after the end of World War II, concluded that there were 5.95 million Jewish victims. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimated that between 5.59 and 5.86 million died and Wolfgang Benz, a German scholar came out with a wider range of between 5.29 and six million. At this stage, most of Yad Vashem's data is drawn from the "pages of testimony" given by Holocaust survivors and others who have evidence that their relatives or friends were killed by the Nazis from the inception of Adolf Hitler's regime in January, 1933, to the end of World War II in May, 1945. Major international archives, such as that of the International Tracing Service, which is situated in Bad Arolsen, Germany, have hardly been tapped. Its files contain the names of 50 million persons, the majority of whom were not Jewish, who perished in the Nazi death camps or worked as slave laborers. Until two years ago, it was kept off limits to all except Holocaust survivors. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which was given custody of its records in 1955 -- a decade after they were collected by U.S. and British troops by order of the Allied military command -- did not let historians and other researchers as well as attorneys examine the material on file. However, its ICRC directors made one exception: In 1958, they allowed a team of experts sent to Bad Arolsen by Yad Vashem and the Israeli foreign ministry to microfilm all the documents that pertain to Jews. About five per cent of this data was restricted however because it related to 'Kapo's' (inmates used by the SS guards to control the prisoners) as well as alleged thieves, informers and other deviants. This material was taken back to Israel. However, it has hardly been tapped by Yad Vashem's name gatherers. Wroclawski estimates that it will take two more years for the digitization process now under way to be completed. At the point, it presumably will be possible to find the names of most of the Holocaust's victims. Prof. Moshe Zimmermann of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, a renowned scholar in German history in and the annals of the German-Jewish community in particular, is skeptical. "Yad Vashem is barely half-way through the name-gathering project," he said. It will take at least another 14 years for it to be completed." Zimmermann noted that until the Nazi era, most of Germany's Jews were enrolled in the well-organized communities that existed in every German city and town in which they lived, but many were not because they did not consider themselves Jewish (some actually were Christians). Even though the Nazis forced those who preferred to assimilate or did not consider themselves Jewish to sign up, tracing their Jewish identity back to their grandparents, the records remained incomplete. This is a handicap for those trying to trace the Nazis' victims and as a result some of the German Jews who perished may remain anonymous. One of the problems raised by Prof. Shlomo Aharonson, also of the Hebrew University, is that the Waffen SS and other Nazi units that engaged in mass murder throughout Eastern Europe did not record the names of their victims. Nor were the casualties registered as Jews of Soviet citizenship. In contrast, there were detailed records of the local Jewish communities' adherents in France, the Low Countries and other Western European countries. This is one of the reasons why the majority of Jews rounded up in "Unoccupied France" by the collaborationist Vichy Regime and expelled to Auschwitz and other death camps were relatively-recent émigrés from the east who had taken refuge in France to escape the Nazi conquest. Name-gathering efforts have not been limited to Israel's Yad Vashem. A similar project was undertaken by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the U.S. It has a massive genealogical database which was used for posthumous baptisms. Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, assailed the Mormon project. He issued a statement in 2008 saying: "We ask you to respect our Judaism just as we respect your religion." Michel, whose parents perished in Auschwitz, added: "We ask you to leave our six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust alone; they suffered enough." A spokesman for the Mormon church regretted Michel's stand and said "it belies the long and valued mutual respect that has been had in past years.” In 1995, the Mormons reportedly agreed not to perform baptisms by proxy or other rites for Holocaust victims except in very rare instances where they have living descendants who are Mormons.
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