In the following you will find:

1. Why use lists of names when studying the Holocaust?
2. Two lists of names 
3. Using the lists 
4. Conclusion

1. Why use lists of names when studying the Holocaust?

• To personalize the individual tragedy of its victims and survivors.
• To give names back to those who were stripped of their identities before they were robbed of their lives.
• To remember that each victim was an individual - a son, a daughter, a sister or brother, a child or a parent with dreams and hopes.
• To remember the lives lost in the Holocaust.
• To pay tribute to the lives the people on these lists led and hoped to lead.
• To educate and influence young people, while giving them a personal experience.
• To defy dangerous trends of indifference and ignorance towards World War II and the Holocaust.
• To perpetuate the memory of those who were killed and to respond to those who say that we should close this chapter in history.
• To counter the efforts of Holocaust deniers who seek to convince the world that the Holocaust never occurred.

(Based on B’nai B’rith Evergreen Region: Public Recitation of Names of Holocaust Victims on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day of Remembrance, http://www.bnaibrith.org.)

2. Two lists of names

• "Unto Every Person There is a Name"
  A worldwide Holocaust memorial project initiated in 1989.  The names were taken from pages of testimony submitted to Yad Vashem where approximately three million names have been collected. 
  
  
• Names listed on the Holocaust Memorial on Mercer Island, WA
  In 1981 a memorial was created outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Seattle on Mercer Island. The memorial consists of a sculpture and a wall of plaques listing nearly 2000 names of those who died. Three hundred Jewish Seattle-area residents sent in the names to pay tribute to their friends and relatives who were killed during the Holocaust.

3. Using the lists

Reading the Names

To make a name recitation effective the students need to know about the background of the list. Where does the list come from, who put together the names, whose names are these, for which purpose does the list serve?

Choose a list. Decide what information you want to read (first name, last name, age, …). Calculate how long it will take to read your list, to make sure that the circumstances allow a respectful atmosphere. To find out how long your reading might last, read one page and multiply the time it took you by the number of pages in your list. To read the local list will take you approximately one and a half hours. Some of the names are complicated to read. Readers might feel more comfortable if they have a chance to look at or read their part before they read in front of others.

Using the list “Unto Every Person There Is A Name"

• Places of death – what kind of places are these? (Ghetto, concentration camp, elimination camp ...)
• Where are the cities/countries/places mentioned? You could borrow a map at the center, where most places are marked, or look up these places on the internet.
• Use a timeline to show what political circumstances might have caused the death of some persons on the list. A poster with a timeline of the Holocaust is available at the center.
• Jewish names – In Judaism it is a tradition to name the children after the father. In addition to the first and last name, you will find the fathers name.

Using the list of names on the Holocaust memorial on Mercer Island, WA

• The names aren’t ordered alphabetically. Names how they were sent in by friends or family members, and they appear this way. That is why sometimes you can see who belonged together. Sometimes whole families were killed.
• At the memorial at Mercer Island there is still the opportunity to add names. Why might some names still need to be added? Why might this be important?

4. Conclusions

Yad Vashem continues to collect pages of testimony in order to rescue from oblivion the memory of the Jews who did not survive the Holocaust. About the pages of testimony it is said: “This is one of the ongoing tragedies of the Holocaust: whole families, whole villages and whole towns were wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazi killing machine, making it difficult to compile a comprehensive list of victims because no witnesses survived. It is incumbent upon us today, before the survivors of the Holocaust leave this world, to try to retrieve from their memory names of any Holocaust victim of which they have personal knowledge. (…)"

It is not essential that every question about the circumstances of the lives of the people on these lists or their deaths be answered by the teacher. It is more important to reflect on the lists, to get the students interested in individual destinies, and to look more deeply at who really makes up this ominous “Six Million.”

Talk about the idea of Holocaust Remembrance Day and why you think the reading names is such an important part of the ceremony.  Why is it important to remember?  How do we remember?  What other ways, tools, and acitivities could we do/use to remember the people who were killed in the Holocaust?  How are people who were killed in other genocides/conflicts remembered and memorialized?