Letters to this website about the Auschwitz camp and Birkenau: Serge Romanov is unimpressed by the much vaunted Yad Vashem website database on Holocaust survivor statistics.

Tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world, previously unknown to each other, created links and references to the wikipedia article, keywords were inserted in personal webpages etc. (activists used an old article on how google achieves its ranking to devise the techniques that would raise the wikipedia entry rating) – and about a week later the hated “jewwatch” site dropped to place number two.

In the process, some cracking was done, so temporarily the jewwatch site became unavailable, and (as far as I remember) complaints to their ISP were sent, so the jewwatch maintainers then themselves stopped serving their pages for a while.

Now, without discussing merits or otherwise of the jewwatch, and however laughable the aim of the campaign might look, it demonstrates with utmost clarity how an Internet campaign can unite unknown to each other Jews from all over the world around what they would consider a “good cause”, even if it seems trivial.

So one really big problem is
verification. New entries must be kept separate and somehow cross-checked before merged to with the main database and made available for general access. Automating the cross-checks is not completely possible, i.e. one will have to keep a pool of human workers, trained in historical research and knowing a number of European languages.

In your notes you speculate on whether the Six
Million Magic Number problem could arise as a result of this project. It seems, Yad Vashem forestalled possible objections already: in their
Frequently Asked Questions text on that site, they plainly state that the number will never reach 6
million:

“When will there be 6,000,000 names in
the database? Never. Some Jews left no trace.
They were murdered with their entire families,
so there was no one left to submit Pages of
Testimony for them; or they left no documentary
traces; or the traces they left were
destroyed. . .”

Then there are problems on the definition of
“survivor”, which are again unsolvable without human attention to each and every record.

To sum up, a simple web front-end with database search and database update capabilities seems a cheap and nice example of how Internet could be used as a tool in historical research to poll previously unreachable for historians resources and persons.

However without serious and well-trained labour-intensive post-processing the project stands wide open to both errors and intentional abuse (as the Internet-literate generations will immediately spot) and cannot, simply cannot claim to become a
Central Database with sufficient degree of veracity.

The above, of course, remains only my personal opinion.

Serge
Romanov

Our dossier
on Auschwitz

Yad
Vashem website

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