Two European organizations dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust have recently handed over lists containing tens of thousands of names of victims who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" reports. The effort is part of a drive to collect the names of all the Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, and officials at Yad Vashem said the lists are likely to include many unfamiliar names. More than three million names have been collected thus far.
The Auschwitz Museum will transfer a list of 68,000 names of prisoners who were subject to forced labor at the camp and later died or were murdered. According to estimates, two thirds of these prisoners were Jewish. The Museum of Deportation and Resistance in the Belgian town of Mechelen will transfer a list containing 25,000 names of Belgian Jews deported to death camps. Nazi officials involved in the expulsion and murder of Jews composed the two lists. The names were transferred during a conference on documentation of the Holocaust held in Jerusalem last week. The main archive of names of Holocaust victims is comprised of about 2.2 million documents from victims' relatives. The archive manager told "Ha'aretz" that the new lists would probably contain many names not yet included in the Yad Vashem archive, as well as new details about the victims.
