Preserving the people in the pages

I'm sure many of you will have seen the media coverage yesterday of Holocaust memorial day, at the 70th anniversary. Most will agree that the Holocaust is something worth remembering, though many will disagree about how - and rightly, as we're all very different people, and some will place commemoration and memorialisation above education and the terrible lessons taught, while others will see it as the ultimate example to use to prevent future atrocities.

Regardless of your standpoint, something horrible happened in the 1930s and 1940s to the people who were Jewish, Communist, Homosexual, Disabled, and likely others who I have unintentionally left out, who were living in Nazi controlled territories. They took their lives, tried to eradicate their identities, their memories, their humanity - but in these latter points they did not succeed.

Projects like those run by the USHMM in conjunction with partners are an attempt to restore that measure of identity, memory, and humanity, that the Nazis did chip away at. The USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) holds large amounts of documentation related to the Holocaust - things such as lists of Polish Jews living in ghettos, and applications for the identity cards which all had to carry. You may think that these things are better forgotten - but I respectfully disagree. The Nazis wanted the Jewish people (and others) to be stripped of their names, instead calling them and branding them with numbers. These documents are the pieces they couldn't take - their names, where they lived, what their occupation was, their parents, their birth details, and in some cases even some small passport-style photographs stuck to the middle of the form. And every one of those people is beautiful.

So, when I'm there typing their details into an index on behalf of one of USHMM's partners (the archiving project of a well-known family history website,) people assume that I find it depressing. And yes, there are moments when you feel sad for what was and what could have been, but overall it's a very positive experience. I can help to restore just a little bit of justice to these people - I can let people know they were there, they existed, they were completely normal, they loved laughed and cried. Most importantly, I can help to give them back their names, their identities - and if that isn't positive I don't know what is.