How AI has identified 1,000 missing Holocaust victims & ‘rescued them from oblivion’ to give families answers 79yrs on
NEW AI technology has helped researchers identify 1,000 Holocaust victims by sifting through thousands of pages of survivor testimony.
Among those recently “rescued from oblivion” is Ruth Rosenbaum of Romania – who was killed in Auschwitz when she was four years old.
Staff at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem have spent 70 years scouring testimony and documents, film footage, cemeteries, and other records.
It is their goal to identify as many of the six million Jews lost to the horrors of the Holocaust as possible.
Their efforts have already allowed them to track down information about some 4.9 million victims, but groundbreaking new AI-powered software should make the arduous task exponentially simpler.
It means millions of documents can be combed through to uncover testimonies and names that have until now gone unnoticed.
Yad Vashem’s Ashley Bartov told The Sun: “I can’t even count to you how much time it usually takes to go through and sift through this information.
“It takes weeks upon weeks, and usually a staff of more than five to 10 people, and it’s all through multiple languages – we’re talking about Polish, German, French, Portuguese.
“In the short time of the program, they have discovered some unbelievable stories and details that have been missed, connected stories through two totally different testimonies, and through that have put names to individuals that were beforehand completely lost.”
The AI program was created by Yad Vashem about two years ago and is still under development, but has already helped to connect families and uncover previously lost information and identities.
Little was known about twin four-year-old sisters Ruth and Yehudit Rosenbaum before the new system came into effect.
Both girls had been taken from Romania to Auschwitz; Ruth was murdered and Yehudit survived.
The AI tech was able to uncover more information about Ruth, from someone she met in the camp.
Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem claimed Ruth was involved in a “twin program” at Auschwitz.
Her cause of death has been listed as “medical experiment”.
Ruth and Yehudit were in “a smaller group” of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the “angel of death” who conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, Yad Vashem’s head of software development Esther Fuxbrumer told Reuters.
Ms Fuxbrumer said the new AI technology only takes a few hours to go over hundreds of testimonies to produce exact results.
Yad Vashem spokesman Simmy Allen explained that the AI tech picks up on details overlooked by humans, purely because of their “limited cognitive abilities”, and connects stories and names to form a picture of who people were before they became victims of the Holocaust.
He told The Sun: “It’s part of Yad Vashem’s DNA from its inception to identify and to remember and to rescue from oblivion the names of those individuals.
“But much more important is also to know who these people were, what their aspirations were, what their life goals were, know that they were parents, children, and siblings, too, and had a family and had dreams.”
The horrors of Holocaust
ONE of the greatest atrocities in world history, the Holocaust cost the lives of millions of Jews across Europe.
The genocide was carried out largely during World War 2, with the rise of Nazi Germany as victims were persecuted, tortured and killed on an industrial scale.
But not only Jews were targeted under Hitler’s regime – Romanis, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also on Hitler’s list.
It is estimated around 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.
The targets were either killed on the spot, drafted to forced labour camps, or sent to concentration camps.
The camps saw innocent men, women and children killed in gas chambers.
Or they died of starvation or illnesses.
The notorious Auschwitz camp would become the grave of at least 1.1 million people.
The horrors started when Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933 and passed antisemitic laws in a bid to force German Jews to emigrate.
And things became even more hellish after the occupation of Poland in 1939.
The nightmare came to an end after the UK, US and the rest of the Allies won the war and liberated the survivors from the remaining death camps in 1945.
Senior Nazi members were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials with the first tribunal trying 23 political and military leaders.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, were excluded as they had committed suicide several months before.
January 27 marks Holocaust Memorial Day – which is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
New testimony is rarely uncovered given many Holocaust survivors have now passed away, or were too young to remember many details about the people they met throughout the horrors of genocide.
Mr Allen said: “What we’re trying to do is use old testimony, testimony that’s been collected over the last nearly 80 years … and to dissect it and see what hidden treasures are found in those testimonies.”
While Yad Vashem does not expect to be able to identify all six million victims – because of the nature of the Holocaust and how entire families were killed within days – it is hopeful that with the help of AI it can name 5.2 million victims in the next decade.
The centre has already provided many victims’ families with insight into the lives of their murdered loved ones – and sometimes even letters they wrote before they were killed.
Mr Allen said: “They wrote these letters, sent these letters, some of them tossing the letter out of the cattle car on the way to their death.”
He continued: “We actually were contacted by the great nephew of one of these victims, who says that he was told as he was growing up about his great aunt who was murdered during the Holocaust.
“But he never ever, until the day that we uploaded this particular letter of his great aunt, he never saw her handwriting.”
Some 1,000 names will be added to Yad Vashem’s central database after its staff ran tests on 400 of a total 30,000 testimonies.
The system will be used on all 30,000 testimonies over the next few weeks, before the next stage of the trial – dissecting diaries – begins.
