Yad Vashem’s ongoing program of encouraging world Jewry to submit Pages of Testimony (POTs) on behalf of family victims of the Holocaust has given heightened priority to aging survivors and other eyewitnesses of those times who may not live much longer. The website, www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/names/index.asp provides the background and a message of urgency to fulfill the mitzvah of honoring our deceased. Who is better equipped to respond to such a noble deed than our community of genealogists? Undoubtedly, many of us have accumulated family history that includes the names of our losses due to the Shoah. But have we reported this information to Yad Vashem?

My own history in responding to the call for Pages of Testimony may be typical. I submitted a handful of POTs for immediate family members more than 20 years ago, but I ignored the many other extended family losses that I have accumulated in a database that has now reached more than 32,000 names. There were just too many victims and, for most, only scant information was available regarding their fate. Truth to tell, I became averse to the manual task of filling out the POT form. Nevertheless, my conscience has nagged at me to identify and report the Shoah victims to Yad Vashem. Accordingly, I sought to automatically generate an acceptable report utilizing my genealogy program.

I used Family Tree Maker and easily generated a custom report that included the following fields: Name, Spouse Name, Birth Date, Birth Location, Death Date, Death Location, and Marriage Date. Death Location was the key record selection field that was qualified by specifying named concentration camps or the indicator “Shoah” or “Holocaust” in the event the death location was unknown. The report yielded an astounding 493 names.

I reported my success to Yad Vashem thinking that I was on to something that could be repeated on a mass scale by my genealogy colleagues. I was informed, however, that the information fell short of what they desired. Could I include at least the names of the parents of the victims? The custom report generator of Family Tree Maker (FTM) was deficient in allowing the inclusion of parent names in the resulting table. Nevertheless, it was possible to generate a special Parent Report. My challenge then became one of combining these two reports. I accomplished this task by exporting the two FTM tables to the Excel application and then merging the two spreadsheets as shown below. I sent this product by e-mail to Yad Vashem in 2007, and took satisfaction in having fulfilled that nagging obligation.

Fast forward to April 2010. Within a two-week period, I received several requests from heretofore strangers who contacted me in connection with their own family relationship to POTs that I had submitted. This led me to query the Yad Vashem database utilizing its advanced search feature, which permits retrieving POTs by submitter’s name. Indeed, such a query led to a list of the 493 names that I had contributed. My automation experiment had been a success! Furthermore, an unexpected dividend came my way from these inquiries by furthering my genealogical research with newly found family branches.

I urge my fellow genealogists to undertake a similar effort and fulfill the obligation that we owe our martyred brethren. You may be rewarded in unexpected ways. Contact at Yad Vashem: Cynthia Wroclawski, Outreach Manager,The Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project

Yad Vashem, POB 3477 Jerusalem, 91034 Israel, e-mail: cynthia.wroclawski@yadvashem.org.il

Werner L. Frank is a founding member, board member, and former newsletter editor of JGS of Conejo Valley. He was one of the founders of Ger-SIG (the German Special Interest Group of JewishGen) and has written articles for ROOTS, Maajan, AVOTAYNU, and Stammbaum (of which he was a former editor).