JERUSALEM — For decades, Hinda Koza-Kalp’s family clung to black-and-white photographs and haunting stories. Her great-grandmother’s six siblings and parents were all murdered in the Holocaust, and their names were largely lost to history.
Then last year, Koza-Kalp entered her great-grandmother’s maiden name, Litvak, into an online database and discovered something she never could have imagined.
Two of her great-grandmother’s siblings survived. One of those brothers had a son living in Israel and he wanted to talk.
“We spent years apart and didn’t know each other for years,” Koza-Kulp told NBC News. “To get that back, to get that joy and that love back…I think the best revenge is, as they say, to live well.”
Koza-Kulp’s discovery was made possible by a database of names at Israel’s Yad Vashem (World Holocaust Remembrance Center). Now, the very database that helped find Koza-Kulp’s family has reached a major milestone. Yad Vashem has recovered the names of 5 million of the estimated 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
“Each person has not only a name, but also a destiny and a face,” Sima Verkovic, leader of Yad Vashem’s family roots research team, told NBC News. “What we want to know is: Who were these people?”
From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered approximately 6 million Jews across Europe (approximately two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population) through mass shootings, forced labor, starvation, and extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Under Adolf Hitler’s regime, millions of people were murdered, including people with disabilities and political dissidents.
Yad Vashem’s systematic efforts to restore the names of Jewish victims began in the 1950s and have continued across generations, powered by survivors, their descendants, and researchers determined to honor all victims.
how did they do it
Reaching this milestone was not easy.
“There never was a list of Holocaust victims,” said Alexander Abram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names and Central Database of Shoah Victim Names.
“The Nazis and their collaborators did not issue death certificates. … In most cases, Jews were simply murdered or gassed, or … there was no registration whatsoever,” Abram told NBC News in an interview inside the Hall of Names.
Men, women, and even children were shot to death in unmarked mass graves. In extermination camps, the Nazis burned the bodies of Jewish victims in crematoriums to hide evidence of the massacre.
To reconstruct the victims’ identities, Yad Vashem researchers scoured tens of thousands of sources, including archival materials.
One important source of information is the Testimony Pages, which are biographical fact reports submitted by survivors and people who knew the victims to preserve their memories.
Abram said each page was carefully scrutinized. Researchers will cross-reference submissions with pre-war lists and historical events, and may request additional documentation before accepting records.
These pages “are believed to be the tombstones of Jews assassinated during the Holocaust,” Abram said.
For families like Koza Culp, these pages are much more than data points. “Being able to look at that photo now and know their names…and know a little bit about them, to me, it makes them feel real and it makes them feel important,” she said. “It makes them feel like they’re important.”
These names also reunited branches of family trees that had been separated by decades.
“Our family ties were torn apart and this…we stitched it back together bit by bit…but the scars will always be there,” she said.
race against time
That sentiment is the driving force behind Yad Vashem’s mission today, as historians scramble to preserve the memories of survivors while they were still alive to witness the genocide. Experts estimate that 90% of Holocaust survivors will be dead by 2040.
New tools may help. Yad Vashem said artificial intelligence could help researchers comb through archival materials, possibly helping them discover about 250,000 more names.
However, AI cannot track names that are not in the historical record. Yad Vashem is imploring survivors and their descendants to share their stories now so that future generations will remember the very people Hitler wanted to eliminate.
“This is the last time,” Abram warned.
Jesse Kirsch reported from New York City and Paul Goldman from Jerusalem.
