Holocaust survivors unveil memorial books for 12,000 victims in Warsaw

Holocaust survivors from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus gathered in Warsaw on Oct. 26 to unveil a new series of memorial books, known in Yiddish as yizker bikher, that record the names, stories and hometowns of the Jews who perished in their communities. The volumes, compiled over the past two years by a network of survivors, descendants and scholars, were presented to families and to the United Nations’ Holocaust Remembrance Center as a collective act of remembrance and reclamation.

The project revives a tradition that began before World War II, when Jewish towns published yizkor books to honor deceased members and preserve communal memory. After the Holocaust destroyed most of those communities, survivors found their histories scattered, their cemeteries razed and their archives erased. In the 1990s, as archives opened in Eastern Europe, a wave of survivors and researchers began to piece together fragments of the past. The new yizker bikher build on that effort, aiming to give voice to those whose lives were erased and to restore the cultural landscape of towns that no longer exist.

Each book contains dozens of personal testimonies, photographs, maps and excerpts from pre‑war communal records. More than 150 families have contributed letters and recollections, and the volumes list over 12,000 individuals from 45 shtetls. Scholars from the United States, Israel and Poland have helped verify the data, while a team of digitization experts is scanning the texts for online access. Survivors who attended the ceremony described the books as “a bridge between loss and memory,” and families said they finally saw their relatives’ names recorded alongside the streets where they once lived.

The organizers plan to make the digitized collections freely available through a multilingual website by early next year, and to partner with schools in Europe and North America for curriculum integration. They also hope the books will inspire similar projects in other regions where Holocaust documentation remains incomplete. By preserving these personal histories, the yizker bikher aim to keep the vanished towns alive in public memory and to educate future generations about the human cost of intolerance.