Description
"Since the 1990s, archivists and museum staff at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum in Poland began an ambitious project to digitize the records housed
within the museum’s archives. These collections, containing the names of
thousands of Holocaust victims, would remain in physical and digital form
until the late 2010s when a searchable database for museum collections was
developed and implemented for the museum’s website. While this database has
been live for half a decade, it is currently being revamped to function as a
digital commemoration site for the lives imprisoned and lost at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp throughout World War II.
Seeing the potential of digital resources to effectively commemorate victims
of the Holocaust, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has identified 400,000
individual victim names that can be preserved and shared through the
museum’s Memorial Archives digital commemoration project. However, this
goal of victim memory reconstruction is limited by the institution's
inability to identify every individual who perished at the camp due to the
purposeful destruction of prisoner records by the Nazis before their
abandonment of the camp in late January of 1944. With only 5% of prisoner
records able to be identified and preserved, archival staff are working to
rebuild victim lists from multiple sources across the globe, creating a
digital repository of victim names to commemorate those detained and murdered
at the camp through digitized archival sources."