How AI identified 1,000 missing Holocaust victims and 'rescued them from oblivion' to give families answers 79 years later

NEW AI technology has helped researchers identify 1,000 Holocaust victims by sifting through thousands of pages of survivor testimonies.

Among those recently “rescued from oblivion” is Ruth Rosenbaum of Romania – who was killed in Auschwitz when she was four years old.

Staff at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem have spent 70 years combing through testimonies and documents, video footage, cemeteries and other archives.

Their goal is to identify as many as possible of the six million Jews lost in the horrors of the Holocaust.

Their efforts have already enabled them to recover information on some 4.9 million victims, but revolutionary new AI-based software is expected to exponentially simplify this arduous task.

This means that millions of documents can be combed through to uncover previously unnoticed testimonies and names.

Yad Vashem's Ashley Bartov told The Sun: “I can't even count for you how long it usually takes to go through and sift through this information.

“It takes weeks and weeks, and usually a staff of more than five to ten people, and all this in several languages ​​– we speak Polish, German, French and Portuguese.

“In the short time of the program, they discovered incredible stories and details that had been missed, connected stories across two completely different testimonies and thus gave names to individuals who were previously completely lost.”

The AI ​​program was created by Yad Vashem about two years ago and is still under 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.

The two girls had been taken from Romania to Auschwitz; Ruth was murdered and Yehudit survived.

The AI ​​technology was able to discover more information about Ruth, from a person she met in the camp.

Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem claimed that Ruth was involved in a “twin program” at Auschwitz.

His cause of death was listed as “medical experience.”

Ruth and Yehudit were part of a “small group” of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the “angel of death” who carried out inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, development manager Esther Fuxbrumer told Reuters Yad Vashem software.

Ms Fuxbrumer said the new AI technology takes just a few hours to review hundreds of testimonials and produce accurate results.

Yad Vashem spokesperson Simmy Allen explained that the AI ​​technology detects details overlooked by humans, only due to their “limited cognitive abilities”, and connects stories and names to form a picture about who people were before they became victims of the Holocaust.

He told The Sun: “It has been part of Yad Vashem’s DNA since its inception to identify, remember and save the names of these individuals from oblivion.

“But it is much more important to know who these people were, what their aspirations were, what their life goals were, to know that they were parents, children and siblings too, that they had a family and dreams .”

New testimony is rarely uncovered since many Holocaust survivors are now deceased or were too young to remember many details about the people they met during the horrors of the genocide.

Mr Allen said: “What we're trying to do is take old testimonies, testimonies that have been collected over the last almost 80 years… and dissect them and see what 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 were killed in a matter of days – it hopes that with the help of AI, it will be able to name 5.2 million victims worldwide. following decade.

The center has already provided many victims' families with insight into the lives of their murdered loved ones – and sometimes even letters they wrote before their murder.

Mr Allen said: “They wrote these letters, sent these letters, some of them throwing the letter out of the cattle car on the way to their deaths.”

He continues: “We were actually contacted by the great-nephew of one of these victims, who said he heard as a child about his great-aunt being murdered during the Holocaust.

“But he never, until the day we put this particular letter online from his great-aunt, he never saw her handwriting.”

Some 1,000 names will be added to Yad Vashem's central database after its staff tested 400 of the total 30,000 testimonies.

The system will be used on all 30,000 testimonies during the following a few weeks, before the start of the next stage of the trial – the dissection of the diaries.