Israel preserves Holocaust survivors' memorabilia for future

RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) — Under a fluorescent light, an archivist from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial snaps photos and scans into her mobile database the last remnant that a pair of elderly siblings have of their long-lost father — a 1943 postcard Samuel Akerman tossed in desperation out of the deportation train hurtling him toward his demise in the Majdanek death camp.

"It's what we have left from him," said Rachel Zeiger, his now 91-year-old daughter. "But this is not for the family. It is for the next generations."

With the world's community of aging Holocaust survivors rapidly shrinking, and their live testimonies soon to be a thing of the past, efforts such as these have become the forefront of preparing for a world without them.

Through its "Gathering the Fragments" program, Yad Vashem has collected some 250,000 items from survivors and their families in recent years to be stored for posterity and displayed online in hopes of preserving the memory of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, even after the last of the survivors has passed away.

Copious video testimonies have been filmed and even holograms have been produced to try to recreate the powerful impact of a survivor's recollection, which has been the staple of Holocaust commemoration for decades. This year, an Instagram account was created based on the real-life journal of a teenage Jewish victim to make her story more accessible to a younger generation.

With the passing of time, any physical links to the Holocaust and its victims have become valuable means of remembrance and evidence against the growing tide of denial and minimization of the genocide around the world.

As Israel starts marking its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day at sundown Wednesday, Yad Vashem will be laying the cornerstone of its new campus for the Shoah Heritage...