Yad Vashem Uncovers
Over 200,000 New Names of Hungarian
Holocaust Victims
Approximately ten years ago, the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem embarked on a critical project to map, copy, catalogue and record the names and personal data of Hungarian Holocaust victims.
"The project of systematically collecting the names of Hungarian victims of the Shoah began in 2007. At the outset of the project, only some 260,000 names were known (representing less than 40% of the total victims from Hungary); after years of intensive work and research, most of the names of the Hungarian Jewish victims – close to 500,000 names (80% of the total number of victims) have been accounted for. Furthermore, the project has uncovered much more than just the names of the Hungarian victims, it has revealed part of their individual stories, and in some cases, for the first time was able to connect a rare photograph with the name of the faceless murdered," said Dr. Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names at Yad Vashem.
In an article published in The Times of Israel, Amanda Borschel-Dan wrote about one individual story:
"Born in Budapest in 1937, Chayim Herzl remembers being taken by his mother Eugenia to visit his father Reuven Salgo at a labor camp outside the city in 1943.
Having lost his father at age six and mother at eight, Herzl has only fleeting memories of his parents. Now, thanks to a comprehensive decade-long project to collect names of Hungarian Holocaust victims, completed in a collaboration between Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Museum Yad Vashem and funded by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
Through the project, Herzl learned that his father died just days before the end of the war in a POW death march, after having been forced into a labor corps in the Hungarian army fighting on the Eastern front. Beyond that, he now has a document with his father’s signature. The signature, his father’s orthographic fingerprint, is the only piece of his father’s writing Herzl owns."
Dr Avram przypomina, że podczas Holocaustu zamordowanych zostało około 600 000 Żydów z Królestwa Węgier.
Paweł Sawicki
Kistarcsa, Hungary. Four Hungarian Jews from the prisoners of the transit camp (courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives)