‘Remember our name’
An extraordinary exhibition will open for the first time in the world, at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 26 January 2023. It contains over 4,8 million names, places of birth and death of the victims of the Holocaust, and stands as a silent and potent reminder of the danger of antisemitism and every form of prejudice and hatred. The Nazis aimedto remove any trace of Jewish lives and destroy thriving Jewish communities. Resisting this, historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized the Oneg Shabbat Archive, the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, to create an historical record of Jewish life and to gather evidence for postwar justice. The Ringelblum Archive contained more than 35,000 pages, including writings, artworks, photographs, underground newspaper, statistics, and objects of Jewish daily life.
Before the uprising and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Archive was buried for safekeeping.. Teacher Israel Lichtensztajn together with his students David Graber and Nahum Grzywacz, buried the first two parts of the Archive in tins and large milk cans in the basement of the Ber Borochovv school at 68 Nowolipki street.
After the war, two of the three parts of the Archive were recovered. In one of them, were the following testimonies:
“With great enthusiasm, I have engaged myself in gathering the archives. I was named the guardian of the documents. (…) The material is well hidden. I hope it will survive – it will be the most beautiful, the best outcome of what we did in these cruel times (…) I do not ask for any thanks, for any memorial, for any praise. I only wish to be remembered. … I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Sekstein. … I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today. … She too deserves to be remembered.” (Israel Lichtensztajn)
“I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. … What we were unable to cry and shriek out the world we buried in the ground. … We shall certainly not live to see it, and therefore I write my last will: May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened… in the 20th Century… May history be our witness.” (David Graber)
“I am going to run to my parents and see if they are all right. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Remember, my name is Nahum Grzywacz.” (Nahum Grzywacz)
‘Remember our name’, they pleaded.
Since its inception in 1953, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, seeks to preserve the memory and names of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. “Yad Vashem” is a Hebrew phrase that means, “a memorial and a name”)Yad Vashem gathers “Pages of Testimony” . completed by survivors or their descendants, friends or acquaintances of victims. Each Page records the victim’s full name, date and place of birth, place of residence before the war, profession, parents’ and spouse’s names, and circumstances of death, as well as a
photograph when available. What of the three archivists who asked that their names be remembered? On 14 April 1956, Shlomo Lichtensztajn, living in 74 King Salomon Street in Tel Aviv, completed several Pages of Testimony to remember the life of his brother, Israel Lichtensztajn, his sister-in-law, Gele Seksztajn, and his little niece, Margalit Lichtensztajn. The same Israel Lichtensztajn who had buried the archive. We now know what became of them. They did not survive, but because of Shlomo’s entries on Yad Vashem’s Pages of Testimony, their names are inscribed into history.The Pages of Testimony, stored for perpetuity, comprise the heart of the “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names”. It is this database that is reflected on the pages of the Book of Names exhibition.
The Book of Names exhibition will be on display from the 26 January to 17 February 2023 at the United Nations Headquarters. The exhibition will open at 1:30 p.m. on 26 January in ECOSOC. Secretary General António Guterres, H.E. Mr. Gilad Erdan, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, and Mr. Dani Dayan, Chair of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center will give remarks. Ms. Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications hosts the event.
