Jerusalem – Motivated by the principle that “every victim has a name,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum has identified nearly 4 million Jews who lost their lives to Nazi Germany’s genocide and is trying to identify the rest while survivors are still alive.
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“We are in a race against time,” said American-born Cynthia Wroclawski, outreach manager of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project. “Our mission is to reach people who have information.”
Ms. Wroclawski said 3.6 million names – just over half the estimated Jewish death toll – have been registered to date.
The monumental task began in 1955, two years after Yad Vashem was established by Israel’s parliament, and accelerated in the 1990s in part because of technical advancements such as the creation of a computerized database.
Once completed, the list could help put to rest arguments over whether the death toll has been inflated for political reasons, such as to justify the creation of the modern Jewish state.
Although the number of Jews who perished in Nazi death camps from gas, firing squads, medical experimentation, illness or malnutrition is commonly given as 6 million, analysts differ on the precise figure.
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. Raul Hilberg, a U.S.-based historian, put it at 5.1 million. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimated that between 5.59 million and 5.86 million died, and Wolfgang Benz, a German scholar, says the range is between 5.29 million and 6 million.
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the figure of six million has unfortunately been the accepted number. However if you look at the prewar versus the post war statistics the number 8.5 -9 million is a more accurate number.
All I know is that I have sent them in names of my relatives two years ago and it still has not been documented. Yad Vashem is not a user friendly institution. There needs to be more communication and outreach to gather the right numbers.
Are these people trying to say that they would feel better if the number was 5 million in lieu of 6 million – 5 million is outrageous too!!!!!!!!!!!
Zeidy, how would you know what is the more accurate number? Were you there to count them? Did you do the enormous amount of research to determine it was 8 or 9 million? Are you a demographer? As it happens, word demography statistics in 1939 said that all of Europe, from England to Russia, had 6 million Jews, half of whom were in Poland, which was divided by the Soviets and the Germans. Israeli statistics say that most of the Jews on the Soviet side of Poland were taken eastward, and fully HALF of those under German Poland survived. So are you smarter than everyone else?