ED. NOTE: More than a decade ago, when historian Paul Shapiro of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) convinced the powers of the world to release the Holocaust files stored at Bad Arolsen, Germany, historians faced a Herculean task. They needed to scan all the documents and make them searchable. As advanced as the systems they looked at were, none of them was capable of reading microfiche facsimiles and original documents of handwritten names that were over-stamped, watermarked, faded and almost impossible to decipher. Machines couldn’t do it. Only people could, and now the USHMM and its partner, Ancestry.com, have found a way to bring students into the process and make the records available to survivors and their families, as well as scholars and researchers. It’s called The World Memory Project.

Paramus—The Frisch School is the second Jewish high school in the country to be invited to participate in the World Memory Project, a joint effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com. The project was created to mine data from microfilmed Holocaust era records previously stored in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The data, which includes the names and information of thousands of victims of the Shoah whose whereabouts have previously been unrecorded or unknown, will then be placed online.

“Two of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust are not identified by name,” said Dr. Kalman Stein, principal of the Frisch School. “Our goal is to give a name to these people.”

“These students are helping to build the world’s largest resource for victims of the Shoah and their families,” said Neal Guthrie, Director of Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resources at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, based in Washington, D.C. “This project has great potential for schools. It’s a great way to add to a Holocaust education program, not only to learn about it but to work with primary documents.”

The initiative of World Memory Project involvement for Jewish schools was started at Charles E. Smith Day School in Rockville, MD, by a child of survivors named Jennifer Mendelsohn, whose children attended the school. She recognized that the World Memory Project could be meaningful to high school students, and that they are tech-savvy enough to work with computer programs that help them make sense of the information.

The project came to Frisch similarly, via Fair Lawn resident Allan Brauner, the father of twin Frisch seniors Caroline and Jonathan, 17. Brauner, like Mendelsohn, is a child of survivors, who, through his own research, found an obscure document in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives with his mother’s signature on it.

“It was a list of names of 200 girls who were working in the Auschwitz concentration camp making German army uniforms,” said Caroline Brauner in a presentation to her fellow students. The document was a paysheet which had information on the wages each girl was supposedly being paid. Through that paysheet, Allan was able to identify and search for his mother’s friend, another survivor, who, as it turned out, had been looking for his mother for more than 50 years. Allan’s mother, now 89, was then able to meet and reconnect with her fellow survivor in Israel.

“We’re the last generation to live among Holocaust survivors, so we know the impact it had on those people, and we are responsible for passing on their stories to future generations,” said Jonathan Brauner.

In the course of Allan Brauner’s research on behalf of his mother at the Holocaust Museum, he was told about the World Memory Project, and began working on it with his children. “It enables anyone to download a computer program to help record information from documents and place it into the database. That data is then transferred to Ancestry.com, where anybody in the world can see it. This project is in the process of becoming the largest online resource of individual victims of the Holocaust,” said Jonathan Brauner.

The work that Frisch students will undertake for the World Memory Project is to key in information on Lodz Ghetto worker identification cards covering the years of 1939 to 1944. The students will learn several German keywords to understand how to transcribe the documents.

The project will begin in the coming weeks with each senior keying in the information on 20 worker identification cards. All 600 students at Frisch will begin participating in the project by Yom HaShoah, which will mean that Frisch students will be responsible for assigning names to 12,000 people whose identities were lost as part of the Holocaust. As the work moves forward, Stein said interested students will have the opportunity to look for other data about the people they identify.

“We want to give names and humanity to those who were victimized,” Jonathan said. “As a result of our work, future generations are going to know the stories of those who came before them, and that information will be available to everyone.”

The names that are recorded through the World Memory Project archives are currently on documents which are visible on non-searchable microfilm and/or are stored as rapidly disintegrating hard copies in European archive facilities. More than 20 projects of varying size have so far been completed, but there is more to do.

Guthrie added that information pulled from a wide variety of disparate sources, such as ghetto worker identification cards, internment camp information and transport lists, seek to provide a more complete picture of each person’s journey and will help families to understand better who their ancestor was and what happened to them. “We’re restoring these individuals, unfortunately not to life, but to humanity, to history, and to their families. No one will ever be able to challenge this information, because we will have it all on record,” said Stein.

All information placed on Ancestry.com from the World Memory Project will be available to the public free of charge.

Allan Brauner, who recently retired from MetLife after 28 years, has a background in managing large, stove-piped databases, and hopes to work on a more encompassing project with the USHMM to help bring together many of the unstructured data sources that make so many Shoah records difficult to use. Guthrie said the museum hopes to make use of Brauner’s perspective, and they will continue to brainstorm together on how to make Holocaust data more searchable.

Individuals are invited to volunteer to help out, and are invited to learn more and participate in the World Memory Project at http://www.worldmemoryproject.org/. Those interested in more information about school involvement or how to search for a relative may contact Allan Brauner at ajbc5_yahoo.com.

By Elizabeth Kratz