by ron kampeas
jta
Digital technology will allow Holocaust survivors, researchers and others access to one of the largest troves of Nazi-era documents — but at a pen-and-paper pace.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum told survivors’ groups last week that searches of the digital version of the Bad Arolsen archives it had obtained would take six to eight weeks to fulfill.
“People understood the challenges,” said Jeanette Friedman, who represented the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants at a closed-door meeting Jan. 17 at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.
The inquiry process will integrate the 46 million documents the Holocaust museum already possesses with more than 18 million documents made available by the International Tracing Service, the agency based in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
The availability of the archives ends a decade-long political and legal battle to open them, which houses information on the fates of about 17.5 million Jews and non-Jews.
Most of the documents available at the museum relate to incarceration, persecution and concentration camps.
Archivists ran a slide show showing how an index card in the files could help David Bayer, a survivor who volunteers at the museum, track his Auschwitz identification card and a census of the Jewish ghetto in his birthplace, Kozience, Poland. The census was the only extant record of his entire immediate family, some of whom perished.
More documents relating to slave labor and to postwar witness testimony are slated to be delivered by 2010.
The digital archives were released simultaneously last year to the 11 nations that control the tracing service. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, was the first to establish a request-processing service last week, although it will not have online capability until next month.
Much of the material delivered to the museums on hard drives packed into suitcases is not yet digitally searchable; images of the documents and 50 million index cards that arrived between August and November of last year are in JPEG form.
Converting those images to searchable files will take lots of time and millions of dollars, officials of the U.S. Holocaust museum said at a news conference before the meeting with survivor groups.
“To make it machine-readable would take millions and millions,” said Sara Bloomfield, the museum’s director. “We don’t have the time.”
Instead, said Michael Haley Goldman, the director of the museum registry, the priority would be to answer survivor questions with trained staffers searching through the material.
Top priority will be given to survivors with outstanding restitution claims on the assumption that some information obtained through the search could facilitate the claims.
Of about 800 inquiries received even before the launch of the service, most had to do with survivors seeking information on the fate of families, Goldman said.
Officials said that in some cases, the archive material would provide death and burial information, which would help in insurance restitution cases where survivors need specific documentation. But officials also warned that in the vast majority of cases, such information was not recorded or preserved at the time.
Some survivors, particularly those still seeking restitution in various forms, had campaigned for instant, Internet-searchable access, and they criticized the snail’s pace of the effort to open the archives.
To make an inquiry to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, call (866) 912-4385 or go to www.ushmm.org/its.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California