Names of 5 million Holocaust victims identified after decades of effort

TEL AVIV: Israel’s Holocaust remembrance centre, Yad Vashem, has identified the names of five million Jews who were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Officials said this marks a major step in restoring the memory of the six million Jewish people who lost their lives in the Holocaust, Times of Israel reported.

The centre said efforts will continue to trace the remaining one million names. “Reaching five million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished duty,” said Yad Vashem’s chairman Dani Dayan. “Behind each name is a life that mattered, a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

Only about 200,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive today, and nearly half of them may not be here in the next few years, according to a calculation made by the Claims Conference earlier this year.

Yad Vashem said that while some names may never be found, new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning could help uncover more victims’ identities in the future.

The effort to identify the names has brought together Jewish communities, archives, researchers, and families from around the world. A large part of the project is based on “Pages of Testimony,” which are short memorial forms written by survivors, relatives, and friends of the victims. So far, over 2.8 million names have been collected through these pages in more than 20 languages, as per Times of Israel.

Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, who has led the program for 37 years, said the pages serve as “symbolic headstones” for people who never had graves. “Most of the victims of the Holocaust were left without graves, without traces, remembered now only through the Pages of Testimony that bear their names. By identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures,” he said.

According to Times of Israel, researchers have also gathered information from letters, diaries, Nazi documents, deportation lists, census records, and legal papers from trials of Nazi criminals and collaborators. Some researchers have even searched Jewish cemeteries and memorial plaques in synagogues to recover missing names.

The centre’s database now includes hundreds of thousands of “personal files,” compiled from various archives, which help reconstruct the stories of individual victims. Over the years, it has helped thousands of families commemorate loved ones, find lost relatives, and reconnect with their roots.

The complete list of names is available online in multiple languages. The milestone will be honoured at a seminar in Jerusalem on November 6 and at an event in New York on November 9, Times of Israel reported. (ANI)