Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum finds new names, stories from Nazi death camp
Archivist Ewa Bazan at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum discovered new names and stories linked to the German Nazi concentration and death camp.
Nazi SS guards on the arrival ramp at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp in Poland, May 1944. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Courtesy of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
“We didn’t know what to expect when we started the project,” Bazan told AFP in a report published on Wednesday. The work of Bazan and her colleagues found 4,000 previously unknown identities and information about 26,000 others.
The identities of 300,000 prisoners out of 400,000 are known, according to the report.
Around 90 percent of the files were destroyed by camp guards before they fled. A recently completed two-year project with the Arolsen Archives of Germany revealed new information.
Krzysztof Antonczyk, head of the museum’s digital archive, told AFP that 905,000 other people, who were not prisoners, were brought there and murdered upon arrival without leaving any records.
“Their names sometimes appear only on transport documents that the Nazis were using,” he said.
The project has digitized 120,000 documents dealing with prisoners at Auschwitz. One new example is two Hungarian Jewish brothers, Jeno and Mor Hoffmann, who were transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and then back again to Auschwitz.
“Auschwitz is the world’s biggest cemetery without any tombs,” stated Antonczyk, according to the report.
JNS
In the Memorial Booklet at the unveiling of a Menorah at Jewish section of a cemetery in country Victoria in memory of those gone too soon.
EACH OF US HAVE A NAME.
Each of us have a name, given to us by God and given to us by parents.
Each of us have a name, by our stature and our smile and given us by the clothes we wear.
Each of us have a name, given us by the mountains, and given us by our walls.
Each of us have a name, given us by stars and given to us by our neighbors.
Each of us has a name, given to us by our sins and given us by our longing.
Each of us have a name, given us by our enemies given to us by our love.
Each of us have a name, given to us by our passions and given us by our work.
Each of us has a name, given to us by the seasons of the year and given to us by our blindness.
Each of us have a name, given to us by the sea and given us by our death.
Written by Zelda.