#everynamecounts challenge for 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

January 27, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Who were the people imprisoned there – and torn away from the lives they knew? To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Arolsen Archives are asking volunteers to help digitize a collection of 27,000 prisoner registration cards – mostly from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The originals are held in archives in Moscow and Prague.

 

How to join in

You want to help draw attention to the fates of prisoners of Auschwitz? All you need are a few minutes of spare time and some digital skills: the documents from the challenge are available from 24th of January at #everynamecounts – you can even digitize them on your smartphone!

To #everynamecounts

Who were the people deported to Auschwitz? Where did they come from, and what did they leave behind? When did the deportations to Auschwitz take place? A collection of prisoner registration cards that have not yet been digitized should provide new answers to these questions. That is why the #everynamecounts challenge for this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day is focusing on these 27,000 index cards. With thousands of volunteers working together, it should be possible to digitize all the names and details on the scanned cards during the week of January 24 to 31, 2025.

 

 

 

Where did the prisoner registration cards come from?

Whenever a prisoner was registered at a concentration camp, the Nazis created a prisoner registration card, where they recorded all of the prisoner’s important personal information. The cards were used to manage and control the prisoners. When the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated, the Red Army took possession of the prisoner registration cards, which eventually ended up in archives in Moscow and Prague. Only when the Cold War ended was it possible to gain access to these documents. Around the turn of the millennium, staff of the Arolsen Archives launched a major effort to preserve them on microfilm. However, when the microfilms were subsequently enlarged, the quality was often poor, and the information on the cards was sometimes illegible. New technology has now made it possible to produce better scans for the #everynamecounts challenge.

 

New information about individual fates

This prisoner registration card filled out for a little boy called Marek is one of the cards in question. According to this document, Marek was Polish, and he was born in the Auschwitz concentration camp on August 16, 1943. He was assigned a prisoner number – 155912 – shortly after birth. In October 1944, the Nazis deported him to a camp for Polish children. We have no record of what happened to him after that. After the war, Marek’s parents spent years searching for their son, but they never found him. All efforts to trace him came to nothing.

Personal stories like Marek’s highlight both the brutality of Nazi persecution and our responsibility to remember its victims. Marek’s prisoner registration card shows that the scattered remnants of Nazi bureaucracy can now help us remember those who suffered persecution. These documents are not only records of individual lives, but also evidence of the scale and systematic organization of Nazi crimes. A process that began with marginalization and discrimination ended with the mass murder of millions.

 

 

Help us build a digital memorial to the victims of Nazism

#everynamecounts invites people to help build the world’s largest digital memorial to the victims and survivors of the Nazi era. This crowdsourcing initiative makes it easy to take a stand and get involved yourself. To join in, all you need is a smartphone or a computer with access to the internet and a few minutes of spare time – then you can start digitizing the names and information on the index cards. Participants can share the challenge on social media after participating. We hope lots of you will join in and tag @ArolsenArchives.

 

 

The challenge at a glance

  • 27,000 thousand documents will go online at 8 am on Monday, January 24
  • Volunteers can take part in the challenge until 8 pm on Friday, January 31
  • An easy-to-understand, intuitive tool is used to enter the data
  • The challenge can easily be shared on social media
Support us
Learn more