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JERUSALEM: Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum announced Tuesday that it has managed to identify two-thirds of the estimated six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide.
“In the past decade we have succeeded in adding about 1.5 million victims' names to the names database,” Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said in a statement announcing the database now contains more than four million names.
“The Germans sought not only to destroy the Jews, but to obliterate any memory of them,” said Shalev.
“One of Yad Vashem's central missions since its foundation, the recovery of each and every victim's name and personal story, has resulted in relentless efforts to restore the names and identities of as many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices as possible.”Yad Vashem said about 2.2 million names came from the testimonies of relatives and friends of the victims, while the rest came from archives and the research of historians.
However some two million names remain missing and finding them was particularly problematic in east European countries, the former soviet Union and Greece, where there were not proper records of Jewish communities or the deportations. – AFP
