Yad Vashem’s Names Collection project in Hungary has now identified some 225,000 names of those killed in the Holocaust in Hungary. “I was finally able to find a sense of closure in knowing what happened to my father”.
Ten years ago, approximately 40 percent of Hungarian victims were identified after the advances made by Holocaust historian and survivor Serge Klarsfeld. Klarsfeld in the 1980s launched the Nevek Project, gathering names from lists of prisoners of forced labour and concentration camps during the Second World War. Due to funding and bureaucratic issues, he abandoned his project.
Building on Klarsfeld’s Nevek Project, Yad Vashem-trained historians have added some 225,000 victims’ names over the past 10 years of intensive research. This major project was funded by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and supported by the late French politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, who served as its first president. On Thursday, Yad Vashem hosted an event that included a special tribute to Veil.
“Simone Veil saw special importance in the collection of names of Hungarian Jews”. She witnessed first-hand the arrival and extermination of Hungary’s Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was important to her that their identities be memorialised and therefore decided to support this important initiative,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.
But the scope of Yad Vashem’s Names Collection project goes well beyond identifying Jewish Hungarian victims. It is, to date, the largest project Yad Vashem has undertaken, and represents a holistic approach to collecting information and documents that far surpasses previous efforts.
