Jonathan Scott finds resources for researching the genocide of European Jews during WW2
Within seven months during the Second World War, Zvi Kopolovich lost his father, brother and mother in the Holocaust. “We had our revenge: the survivors were able to raise magnificent families – among them myself. This is the revenge and the consolation.”
The Holocaust (or Shoah) was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. They also enslaved and killed other groups seen as inferior or dangerous, including Roma, Poles, Slavs, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, political opponents and homosexuals.
The amount of data online for researching victims and survivors can seem overwhelming. There are several museums, international bodies and memorials that each contain millions of names. These are available to search for free, and many include free-to-view digitised documents and images. There are also expanding crowdsourcing projects and several collections you might not have come across. There is a great deal of data, including accounts – many harrowing – available online.
JEWISHGEN’S HOLOCAUST DATABASE
w jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/ JewishGen describes itself as the global home for Jewish genealogical research. As such, the website focuses on the wider subject of tracing Jewish ancestry. Click the research tab and options include ‘country and topical databases’, ‘memorials and plaques’, ‘family trees’, and this collection of databases that hold information on more than 3.79 million records containing details of victims and survivors of the genocide. It offers a useful ‘phonetically like’ option in the surname search box, or you can scroll down to investigate the component databases. For example, The Aufbau Database contains names of more than 33,000 Holocaust survivors published in the German-language newspaper Aufbau in New York, 1944–1946.
THE CENTRAL DATABASE OF SHOAH VICTIMS’ NAMES
w yadvashem.org The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem sits within a 45-acre campus comprising museums, exhibitions and memorials. The Thematic and Chronological Narrative defines exactly what it was, each chapter divided into shorter texts, with photos, testimonies, footage, documents, artefacts and art. The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names contains references to around 4.8 million of the near six million Jews murdered by the N
