NEW AI technology has helped investigators identify 1,000 Holocaust victims by examining thousands of pages of survivor testimonies.
Among those recently “rescued from oblivion” is Ruth Rosenbaum, from Romania – who was killed in Auschwitz when she was four years old.
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Staff at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem have spent 70 years combing through testimonies and documents, footage, cemeteries and other records.
Their aim is to identify as many of the six million Jews lost in the horrors of the Holocaust as possible.
Their efforts have already allowed them to locate information on some 4.9 million victims, but innovative new AI-based software is expected to make the arduous task exponentially simpler.
It means that millions of documents can be combed through to uncover testimonies and names that have previously gone unnoticed.
Yad Vashem’s Ashley Bartov told The Sun: “I can’t even tell you how long it normally takes to sift through and analyze this information.
“It takes weeks and weeks, and usually a team of more than five to 10 people, and all in several languages – we’re talking Polish, German, French, Portuguese.
“In the short time of the program, they discovered some unbelievable stories and details that had been lost, connected stories through two totally different testimonies, and in doing so gave names to people who were previously completely lost.”
The AI program was created by Yad Vashem about two years ago and is still in development, but it has already helped connect families and uncover previously lost information and identities.
Little was known about four-year-old twin sisters Ruth and Yehudit Rosenbaum before the new system came into effect.
Both girls were taken from Romania to Auschwitz; Ruth was murdered and Yehudit survived.
The AI technology was able to uncover more information about Ruth from someone she met at camp.
Testimony presented to Yad Vashem stated that Ruth was involved in a “twin program” at Auschwitz.
The cause of his death was listed as “medical experience.”
Ruth and Yehudit were part of “a smaller group” of famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the “angel of death” who conducted inhumane medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, said Esther Fuxbrumer, head of software development at Yad Vashem. Reuters.
Fuxbrumer said the new AI technology takes just a few hours to analyze hundreds of testimonies and produce accurate results.
Yad Vashem spokesperson Simmy Allen explained that AI technology picks up details ignored by humans, purely because of their “limited cognitive capabilities,” and connects stories and names to form a picture of who people were before become victims of the Holocaust.
He told The Sun: “It has been part of Yad Vashem’s DNA since its inception to identify, remember and rescue from oblivion the names of these individuals.
“But much more important is also knowing who these people were, what their aspirations were, what their life goals were, knowing that they were parents, children and brothers too, and that they had a family and had dreams.”
The horrors of the Holocaust
ONE of the greatest atrocities in world history, the Holocaust cost the lives of millions of Jews across Europe.
Genocide was largely perpetrated during World War II, with the rise of Nazi Germany, as victims were persecuted, tortured and killed on an industrial scale.
But not only Jews were targeted by Hitler’s regime – gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also on Hitler’s list.
It is estimated that around 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.
The targets were killed on site, summoned to forced labor fields or sent to concentration camps.
The camps saw innocent men, women and children killed in gas chambers.
Or they died of hunger or disease.
The notorious Auschwitz camp would become the burial place of at least 1.1 million people.
The horrors began when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and passed anti-Semitic laws in an attempt 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 freed the survivors from the remaining death camps in 1945.
Senior Nazi members were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials, with the first court trying 23 political and military leaders.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels were excluded because they had committed suicide several months earlier.
January 27th marks Holocaust Remembrance Day – which is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
New testimonies are rarely discovered, as many Holocaust survivors have passed away or were too young to remember many details about the people they met during the horrors of the genocide.
Allen said, “What we are trying to do is use old testimonies, testimonies that have been collected over the past almost 80 years … and dissect them and see that hidden treasures are found in these testimonies.”
Although Yad Vashem does not expect to be able to identify all six million victims – due to the nature of the holocaust and the way entire families have been killed in a few days – it is expected that, with the help of AI, it can identify 5.2 millions of victims in next decade.
The center has provided families of many victims with information about the lives of their murdered loved ones – and sometimes even letters they wrote before they were killed.
Allen said, “They wrote these letters, they sent these letters, some of them throwing the letter out of the cattle car on the way to their death.”
He continued: “In fact, we were contacted by the great-nephew of one of these victims, who says he was told growing up about his great-aunt who was murdered during the Holocaust.
“But he never, until the day we sent this particular letter from his great-aunt, he never saw her handwriting.”
About 1,000 names will be added to Yad Vashem’s central database after its team carried out tests on 400 of a total of 30,000 testimonies.
The system will be used in all 30,000 testimonials throughout the year. next a few weeks, before the start of the next stage of the trial – the diary dissection.
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
