Archive to Expand Access to Files on the Holocaust
BAD AROLSEN, Germany, Aug. 2 — Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.
But last May, Mrs. Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary....
Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information — not just to survivors like Mrs. Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.
On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
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But last May, Mrs. Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary....
Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information — not just to survivors like Mrs. Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.
On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.