Saturday, April 16, 2011

Tracing children of the Holocaust using social media

From the Beeb:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is hoping to use social media and web technology to trace more than 1,000 children who survived World War II but became separated from their families in its aftermath. Photographs taken at the time by aid workers at refugee centres are the only record of the children's identities - and their fate remains a mystery.

Many of the children in the pictures, who are both Jewish and non-Jewish, are infants, too young to remember the war that displaced them.

Others are teenagers who almost certainly witnessed the death of close relatives and experienced first-hand the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and forced labour.

In what may be the last opportunity to find out what happened to them, the museum is turning to social media, publishing photos from various archives on its Remember Me website.

"We're using technology in ways we were not able to in the past, especially with social networking, Facebook and Twitter, which is helping us spread the word really quickly," says Dr Lisa Yavnai, director of the museum's Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center and head of the Remember Me project.

Dr Yavnai says speed is critical as many of the survivors are now in their 80s and their numbers are dwindling.

"We don't know if many of them have Facebook pages, but maybe their children and their friends do, so we hope we'll find them that way," she says....


There is much more, including links and videos, here.

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