How AI is helping Holocaust researchers find unnamed victims
Esther Fuchs Brumer holds up a photo of twin girls. From Romania that were twin girls 4 1/2 years old that were in like a smaller group under Mengele. The group in Auschwitz you did survive with kill was murdered. Ruth is one of the more than 6,000,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. Until recently, very little was known about her. Fuchsbermer is part of a team of researchers at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem who are trying to fill the gaps in existing records. Using artificial intelligence, they have been able to step up the search for details of unknown and known victims like Ruth. And we were able to bring more information about Ruth from someone that’s not her family at all, someone that met her in the camp and. We believe that way we’ll be able to be a lot of stories about a lot of. Victims that were killed. Little kids that no one else knew to tell us a story about what happened to them. The AI powered software assist through records in English, Hebrew, German, Russian and other languages. Over the years, volunteers have tracked down information on 4.9 million individuals by hand, by reading through statements and documents, checking testimonial, film footage, cemeteries and other records. Then there’s a mammoth task of linking people to dates and family members. While watching for duplicates and comparing accounts, Fuchs Brumaire says AI streamlines the process and removes human error. That technology works very fast. It takes a few hours to go over hundreds of testimonies, and it’s very exact. The results a human being wasn’t able to do it is sort of. From each testimony, we could get between 6:00 or seven names with full details that we could put automatically into our. Database and Around 10% of the name that we found we had already in our database, but 90% are new names that we didn’t know about. Fuxper Mayor says 1500 new names have been added to the records and many more are expected in the coming weeks as the system gets through all 30,000 testimonies. There are lots of people that were murdered and no one knows about them. And there were people like me and you that lived here and had feeling and and. Had lives and were happy and wanted to live and it’s very important to remember every name of them and each each one and one of them.