 Thank you and welcome you all. We will start our second session after the opening session we had yesterday at the Aula Magna, the University of Barcelona. The work sessions that have been taking place since yesterday, today and tomorrow, both at the University of Barcelona as well as in the old Modelo prison in the city of Barcelona, trying to have an international perspective about legislation and about the databases with respect to the victims and its co-organized by the Secretary of State of Memories and the origin of these work sessions on part of the origin stems from the work of conceptualization that took place the Secretary of State of Memory of the future state census of victims. The year 2021 the Secretary of State of Memory performed or commanded a task to a render company with Alejandro Peña who's here with us today and our company La Funería, General Corbella and yours truly in order to prepare a conceptualization on how future census of state census of victims should be like after the approval of the law of democratic memory that recently was passed in the Senate to carry out this work we analyzed first of all the situation of the different databases we have in Spain those that have memorialistic association and institutions and university projects we analyzed up to 39 different cases and after this analysis we reached some conclusions and the next part of our job was to identify which are the best practices with respect to victims databases in all the world we analyzed five different cases out of these cases for the work sessions for today's work sessions we invited we had invited the Arlesen files and the National Archive of Memory so that they can tell us more about the aspects we underscored in this conceptualization so with no further delay i will get the floor now to the speakers and what i will do first and before i do that is to introduce them following the program order that you all have i'm sure alexander aram from yad bashem alexander has got a degree in philology from the universities of bukarest and the high hero in university he's a doctor in history from the barhilim university he worked in yad bashem since 1984 and since the year 2000 he's been the director of the central database of the victims of shoah in yad bashem alexander you have the floor and you have 20 minutes tops thank you after the holocaust what was clear is that in most many jewish in europe we have this images bergenberg and in the east of europe in the forest of the old soviet union where there was not even a milestone the common rapes and there was a need to have a memorial that was created in jerusalem and this is the hall of the names the war started in 1946 immediately after the war here we can see the first protocol of yad bashem february of 1946 with the main with the documents about the holocaust and then trying to recuperate the names and here we'll see how to do it we'll approach in the families so that they can record the names of people who didn't come from the holocaust and in parallel address our archives to find documents or retrieve documents that had existed in the past this is how the witness pages looked like here you have one in spanish this is a record a personal record about the victim of the holocaust with the name last name the name of parents plays in the date of birth the residence before the war and profession where this person was during the war and if you know the date of death below we have the name of the person that supplied this information that generally speaking uh usually relatives or friends neighbors people who knew the victims here we have a summary of the different types of collections of these witness pages first stage was 1955 1957 national campaign of collection with 800 000 names and further on we can see that in the years 1999 or the 2000 another campaign and in parallel the computation of all the names currently we in the names how we have over 2,800,000 names of the victims of these witness pages this is an image of the intensive project we had in 1999 when computerizing these witness pages and this collection of the pages of testimony was recognized by UNESCO and this is the memory of the international registry the first time in history when genocide was documented individually in parallel we are also working with different records documents and memorial work here you see a list of Jews that were deported to Transnistria different camps in that area and each one of the names includes a record in the computer with all the data that appear in the source what we currently have in the database is as I said nearly three million of names in the pages of testimony and we have 200 000 pictures it's not a very high percentage because unfortunately most of the victims don't have a picture but when we have pictures a lot more than an inch in the face it's very important and in parallel we have approximately three million records of names that come from different sources hundreds of different sources victims per countries deportation in ghettos and camp memorials lists etc in total we have five five million five seven hundred sixty eight one hundred seventy eight uh records of names were obtained from the different sources when uh doing the cross group reference we have less victims where one victim appears in more than one source and in the database we have four million eight hundred thousand victims individual victims we are speaking about Jews that were killed during the Holocaust in parallel we also have over one million two hundred thousand records of names of Jews that were victims of the prosecution and whose final destination is unknown we don't know if they survived or they were killed it's five fifty five thousand names of prisoners in ghettos and camps seven hundred and fifty thousand names of Jews that were registered for forced labor not always and a very big amount of names of victims of during the evacuation Jews that the Germans arrived in June 1941 they took shelter and in the western side of the Soviet Union over seven hundred thousand names of survivors most of them have been placed in the internet considering the limitations of the laws of privacy all these names are in the internet we still have names of uh or families that look to try to find what happened to their relatives our database was open to the internet in the year 2004 he has had all the countries and territories that are visiting our site percentage uh percentages one third of the visitors are from latin america one third from europe and others from israel and a few other countries more seven hundred and thirty thousand uh sessions search sessions have taken place in our database we have a world average which is a procession which is three and a half minutes the average in other countries is two thousand twice more people seem to have an interest in our database the database is very interactive whenever possible this means that we offer visitors the possibility of sending us requests with respect to additional documents pictures and data some things that can be added to the records and suggestions so that we can connect to maybe records and every year we add hundreds of thousands of new additional records names new names last year 72 thousand new additional names comparing this with a known amount of victims per country in our database we have most of the names of victims come from central europe and western europe 1995 percent but when we are dealing with with eastern europe we're dealing with 70 percent having to deal with poland romania the ex-soviet union and greece and unfortunately in Libya we else well we have less than half of the names because there are no sources of of information and not enough survivors that can help us recuperate the names lately we are recuperating names of places that are less uh how to call them less obvious such as for example names that appeared in books about religious topics here the author published in this book and it's dedicated to a long list of relatives that died during the holocaust in san agogs we have a memorial plates and sometimes even in the uh graves we have the name of a person who passed away after the war we have the names of these people that passed away during the holocaust so that there's a clear reference so that families can gather or meet with the memory of the loved ones we have some cases that some relative cases where where we have more than one source for the same person and this is what we do for example if i'm looking in a database for a person called Rudolf Stadler we have 11 different results and we don't know if it's the same person or it's different people as soon as we cross the reference the data we realize it's four different people one of them we have more than one source of information this is what we call a cluster the link between different names and here we can see the nine records of different sources that refer to this person we also have the possibility of seeing all the multimedia images and in fact the original documents this is a copy including a witness protest memorial page this is the petition list and here we can also reconstruct the itinerary of this person during two years during 1944-1945 from the south of Czechia to Dresdenstadt, Dachau, Auschwitz and Kauchering and ultimately this person was killed in Leipzig I think he said well this process of cluster creation took place through two parallel ways one is manual validation and comparison of data and so far we have been able to create over 150,000 clusters in such a manual way but we're also trying to work with computer algorithms that will help us speed up the process and we have created over 400,000 clusters in such way in total we have 150,000 clusters and I think that the potential is still bigger probably 400 additional around 1000 additional clusters will be generated we are moving slowly and because the problem is that the documents we have is not very homogeneous and therefore the personal data we have about certain people are not always the same in the different sources so the comparison is not so obvious here you can see the comparison of the different fields such as names last names the name of the father or the mother spouse place of birth date of birth so we are comparing all this and we are giving a qualification and if it's at least different points of convergence well then we can decide that we are dealing with a cluster in our database we are also trying to offer a possibility the possibility actually to to make requests to the database and being held with suggestions to make new clusters for example if a person gets in our site and maybe they're looking for their grandfather and they see that they have five different records of names that seem to be related to the same person then they can open up the or click on the buttons and there will be a list of data comparison if they conclude that the four of these records are referred to the same person they can send us a suggestion that we will review and then we will validate this and then we will have the link in the database the problems we have faced is that we are dealing about over nearly 40 different languages where we have different sources with different alphabets you have the latin alphabet berkovich and hongarian check the same last name berkovich with gibro or in yiddish here in syriac characters in russian or could be vulgarian etc or syriac and also we have this page of testimony not so many but a few hundreds which are registered in greek in fact we are working with different alphabets and this is difficult to do when processing data we work with two different concepts one is to respect the original retography as expressed in the source no with no corrections because any correction that we may do the person who wrote the document in one way will look for the document in the same way he wrote or she wrote it and we're also working with names and places with closed fields in that sense that each field has a controlled vocabulary and the person who's registering data will have to find the same handwriting or writing in considering the possibilities if such thing does not exist the document will send to an expert that will verify that will double check the the ciphering of the writing and maybe if necessary a new retography will be added here we have an index of graphic changes or variants 165 variants of verkovits last name in latin alphabet in hebra alphabet and syriac etc all these variants are related with verkovits the generic verkovits last name and the benefit here is that the generic name is translated once transliterated if you wish in the three alphabets this means that we or if if someone is checking our database in russian on hebrew or latin characters we won't have to transcribe all the names or last names but rather we will be using these transliterations of the generic name we'll be able to present the name or last name in the three different alphabets the same is done with names personal names here you can see abraham which is very common here we have 1200 graphic variants and semantic variants because abram abhi abrasha in russian abrasha has a nickname which which is boomer in jiddish is abrem abruchi and so on and so forth so the computer has to know that all these variants have to do with the same person on the other hand we have the geographic names which have different names in different languages so we have graphic variants and historical variants according to the location or the times i suppose that all people that will know the the name of bratislava the capital of slavicia but i don't know that bratislava is press working german and posh working hungarian historically slavicia was under was part of the kingdom of hungary for 1000 years in the documents we have in the in our records eight percent of albashan is in hungarian and the name of bratislava doesn't appear at all only fusion bratislava is unknown if the computer doesn't know that fusion bratislava is the same thing all the documents in hungarian will not be accessible we have approximately nine more than nine thousand names with 190 uh thousand variants 105 thousand lesbians with over 630 000 variants and geographic names all in different parts of europe north africa as well and names of areas of prosecution that's all i have the names of camps ghettos prisons and killing places where people were killed with the different variants a final thing that i wanted to mention is that we are currently trying to find people and this is very important for us in order to find documents and information about the people that we are looking for the names of jews have a specific difficulty because they were translated into different languages and what you can see here the name arie which is leo in hebra was traditionally translated into leib in yiddish and for sefradi jews is aslan in turkish translation in the hero cultural tradition the name of arie is related with the tribe of judea and this means that the person could be called arie yudalin and in a document he may appear as arie or yuda or lem and this means that initially we couldn't we won't be able to find the correlation if we don't find a link amongst these names also we may have this under the name of leo and here you can see different names zahaba is means gold hero golda the same in slave hungarian golda is yiddish slata is enslaved and well all this can be the same person depending on the historical context well so far so good about what we have been doing if you have any questions later on i'll be happy to answer thank you well good alexander thank you for following the time suggested and your fantastic presentation in this excellent spanish now we will have well later we will open up the microphone to to the audience i think that you have covered different oh you could see the reactions of the public this awakened a great deal of interest following the order of the of our panel in the arxen archives in the program will help yura swelling the director of the the unit of archives of arxen well it was impossible for this person to be here but we have another person who will cover with the dissemination and the management of the data in the arxen archives is francisco sugar thank you very much francisco francisco studied history at the university of henna and lipstick and between the year 2014 and 2021 she has been the assistant research assistant in the department of indexation of archives in the arxen archives and since the year 2021 she is the head person of the service of the users of of arxen archives as we said before with the rest of the speakers it's 20 minutes thank you first of all thank you for the invitation and sorry from girl and i will talk about the data processing and dissemination and and the arxen archives i'm sorry i have some technical issues i can hear myself so maybe i can switch from my headphones um yeah first of all i want to give a short introduction to the arxen archives and then come to our database and to all the problems we face the same as yappa sham a lot of them are the same and we have different approaches or sometimes the same first of all the institution of the arxen archives we are about we are international center on malsey persecution that means we have a huge archive on the themes concentration camps ghettos prisons forced labor and displaced persons in the context of malsey persecution and our archive contains more than 30 million documents related to this theme we have a lot of originals but of course a lot of copies in our archive for example from institutions like yappa sham for memorial sites or archives all over the world we are with our archive an important unique and unique source of knowledge and in our online database we have since four years more than one million users worldwide the arxen archives are located in germany and they were created by the allies they combined and collected documents from concentration camps from companies from where forced laborers have to work from institutions or organizations like the international refugee organization and this example of Thomas Birkenthal shows that a lot of survivors don't have like in this case of his father any place to go any memorial your site so our archive is something of a memorial your site for them even if we are if we have only the documents collected from the different sides of persecution the arxen archives or international tracing service as the name was until 2018 was found by the end of the second world war and the allies as i said combined and collected all the different documents from concentration camps because millions of people were persecuted were murdered deported and the relatives were yeah i have to search for them so it has to be an institution to answer the requests and all the yeah to clarify the fate and that's a task we are doing until today so we were found as an international tracing service and still today we receive approximately 20 000 inquiries a year and most of them from the second third or fourth generation and of course from researchers from pupils in your universities and so on yeah as i said we are located in arxen it's a small town in the middle of germany and the it s was officially founded in 1948 by the international refugee organization here you can see first glance of what is now called the archive it's as you can see the documents were collected and were stored in under difficult conditions and the main task was to find missing people and to give answers to their relatives who were searching them yeah and in 2019 we changed our brand name in 2000 archives to show that we are not longer only a tracing service but also an archive and we want to be open as much as possible um you can see your first uh or glimpse of our archive as it's today and um our archive as i said contains more than 30 million documents and in addition to that um over 50 million index card of our so-called central name index and in this card index there were about 17 to 18 million names um and in the background of the photo you can see the small boxes and the cards are sort of in there um yeah and that's a short quote we had in our on our um main building that was one of our task in the 50s to to also um be a yeah something of a memorial site or to that's our task not to forget um our own history was a bit difficult but since 15 years we are very open to the public and we want to spread our data as much as possible which brings me to the second part and the interesting one for this conference um our database and how we manage our data process them and uh yeah um published them online so um as i showed you in the photo um or said that we have a central name index it's our main finding aid to find names in our documents it was created in the early 50s and um here you can see um one of the digitized cards we have in our database this card index was indexed in late 90s um due to the reason um because we have a lot of a lack um or then yeah uh inquiries had to wait approximately um about two or to five years to get an answer from us because we received so many inquiries and the backlog was so high that we had to change our workflow and um the central name index was the first group of documents we digitized and um with this digitization there was also the first um that was the initiative to build a database so what you can see here is our um as a screenshot from our database it was created for the international tracing service and um it's as you can also see um it's a digitized image of the central name index um and that's how the um the persons or the staff members at our institutions searched for names so they type in the name and they get um this result and they have to check every card if the name appears on this card and then go to the documents relate to this card um and the next step was um to index some of them of the cards to give an anchor system and the central name index is also built in an alphabetic frenetic system so what Alex mentioned before the problem that you have to face misspellings or different spellings of names um that's the problem we also have um we have this um then for example the name of Bramovich we have over 800 different um types of writing and this database covers with the phonetic um all the misspellings so that one have um a high percentage of um that the result they got is clear and they find every card we have um for this person in the second step we um this example I show you is um connected to another so uh when I when one search for Aaron Kempler we got this card in the central name index and this refers to a transport we have in our documents and this transport less you can see here um in the second step we um indexed directly from the document so that's um one example of them when you go into our database and search for Aaron Kempler you also got the result directly linked to the document um on the right side here you can see um what we have indexed here we have a lot of information mostly we indexed only the name and the birth date because our main issue is still to find the people but also we have to build approaches to um themes or locations together for example gear references or something like that but that's um something we've faced now and in the past I think 20 years our main issue was to find the name also to index the names um and on the next step we published um the documents online and we only published um the documents themselves and not our main finding aid the central name index because it's too complex and it's not fully indexed so we um try to um make it more most easy for the users to find documents online so when you search in our online section for our number you get this result and it's related to the transport list I showed you before um and also one can see that when I search for this person we only have two data sets so it's not uh what we have in our databases more we have there are more information in the online publication it's um less information but we add as much as possible and as you can see here it's housed by Yad Vashem so only the connection here is also very close and um our goal is that we want to publish all the names we have in our archive online until the year 2025 and that's a huge challenge because we don't have indexed every name and every list we have we spoke about millions of documents and a lot of them are lists and lists are hard to index um so what are hope we can achieve this goal um what we are doing in the last 20 years is indexing manually so staff members from the arson archives um do nothing than index the documents um it's not as deep as for example Yad Vashem did so we don't double check names for example we indexed from the documents themselves so when there is a misspelling or the the name on the document is not the name it the real person had we don't check it we index what is on the document written so that's one of our challenges we have to face um of course we are using OCR and also handwritten text recognition we are in the face of um um yeah um testing um list um OCR to index all the lists and we also um do some crowdsourcing maybe you heard of the project every name counts uh where we have um I think more than 2.5 million names indexed by the crowd in the last two years so that's the of course these data we also have to process um but it's something it's a number we can't achieve um only by our own staff members um and what challenges do we face um in addition here in this transport list um I um showed you we have this list online and here we have an a user who write to us that her grandfather appears on the list and um she mentioned that the of the of the house where you lived in it's not the right one listed here he said number 13 but she said it's number 34 we you see what we indexed and as I said we indexed from the document and this um adding or enriching our data with the information for example relatives gave to us or researchers and they say okay we'll have this data um but we know this person maybe it wasn't in Auschwitz even her name appeared on a list um but we know she didn't get get on this transport or she could um flee or um one document said that someone survived and the relatives told us no um there was this person was murdered that's information at the moment we can't add into our database and make it accessible for um for everyone to see online that's a huge challenge we have to face because of course it's very uh important that we also add data we had received from the users so and when we get more on the more we get online the more feedback we get from the crowd for example when we do crowd sourcing or even the online archive so that's one example another one I had here uh there we have a list and there was said um that um um I think that was the um place of birth here is the wrong one um and but at the moment we don't have the as I said the possibility to add this data so we only indexed what is written here um and um the second um main issue we are facing now is we are understanding ourselves as a hub so we um add data from different institutions archives and so on for example here um we have the metadata of the Fortuna of your archive for holocaust testimonies and we add the links to um the main source um but also we are very willing and um trying to share our data as much as possible so we are working with different universities and um yeah support them with their studies to we we give um our data as plain data or with the meter or with the images we have scanned and um a lot of memorial sites for example Buchenwald Sachsenhausen and so on they have access to our database and they yeah can enrich their own data with ours so that's um something we have to um make it more it's at the moment it's very punctual and where it's very um it depends on the institution but we are willing to be more open and to give as much possible data as we can but of course we are in some cases we are limited because we have copies from other archives and there are some legal issues we are facing so um yeah and that's a quote from one attorney um so we are at war that it is very important that we share our data as much as possible to give access to them but also to give clear data and the point of clear data um is very challenging we are trying to we are testing different approaches and systems and we are also um yeah very open to any suggestion or experience our institution are facing so that's um yeah in short um what i can say about the hours and archives and doctor processing and also i'm happy to answer questions um if may one occurred thank you uh francesca and thank you for your very respectful time management and you're very clear presentation i think that just like alexander you've left many doors open and i'm sure those doors will be used later in our discussion session we're proceeding now with silvia san martin uh now the idea of the board is the conceptualization of the state uh database for victims now we have analyzed different icons in this field and in the national archive of memory in argentina we found an excellent best practice that we wanted to learn from and they are unified uh registry of victims so we're going to have from the federal network of archive of memory and the unified registry for victims of terrorism of a state we're going to have silvia san martin she's a psychologist and she's got a master in research and she works at the national archive of memory in argentina coordinating the unified register for state terrorism victims and we are now going to listen to silvia for 20 minutes so that we then have time for discussion which i think is very very necessary so silvia i hope you can hear me good morning good morning everyone my idea with this presentation is to go back to the story of how we got to our current database i'd like to focus on the importance of unifying data in a single database in order to discover the recent past of my country our program unified register for state terrorism victims deals with the systematization and the visualization of the repression of the state between the 20th of june 66 the coup d'etat of ungania where we saw the implementation of the national security doctrine until december 83 where we recovered the democracy after the genocide of coup from 76 the idea of systematizing and visualizing the sources to creating a unified national register for all victims including the children who were separated from their parents the children who were appropriated the people who survived concentration camps the people who were forcefully disappeared and the people who were murdered we also systematized everything to do with burial sites the usually clandestine burial sites mass graves we all know about the flights of death the people in the ocean and we draft the official register for the whole of the state the idea of unifying a single list comes already from the dictatorship when angios received claims for people who disappeared and they all started drafting their own lists that beginning was important to then get to know the people of the names of the people who disappeared and then some of them who survived after we regained democracy in 83 we created the national commission on disappeared people corner there where once again we received more claims on disappeared people and the human rights organizations contributed with their own lists corner that was the first unified list for the illegal repression that took place in the whole country now based on those lists there was a court case for the people in charge of the military junta who led the country that was court case 13 of 1984 and that's when we saw the publication of our book Nunca mass never again with the attached list of names that had been gathered in all the investigations then the whole thing went on and legislation was passed on forced disappearance of people and victims preparation when those laws were passed more or less 94 1994 there were more efforts on unifying lists there were efforts to unify lists for disappeared and murdered people a big effort was made to gather more and more data which recovered the database from corner depth and we started adding verified data the possibility of having a unified database is crucial but this database is organized by victims so the focal point is the victims we have their personal details so their id number name and surname date of birth place of birth age when the event took place the kidnapping for example then there is a series of data on the event itself whether it was a kidnapping murdered or kidnapping and then murdered so one victim could have more than one event related to them and then a data group related to their holding in clandestine centers the people who saw them there and what happened in that place little quotas little quotes from the survivors then we have another data group on legal cases which are still ongoing we are sources to take to justice the people who are responsible for the genocide in my country then identifications pregnancies militancy because they were all political militants so based on all that data this is a relational database organized per victim organized according to the victim so we can have a file for that victim with all the information we have on that person we also have a list per clandestine detention center this has been verified and corroborated with all the information we have on them there is a publication posted on the secretariat website dating from 2015 and there we have the lists and attachment with statistics maps with geolocation of clandestine detention center in all the country over 800 already then all the technical information like descriptions etc what are our sources in order to systematize the information we have we have digitized many sources including all the old documents from old conadep all the claims that were taken after the closure of conadep we're still receiving claims from survivors we're still receiving added data from victims relatives so we're still holding interviews with relatives and survivors the one who hadn't been listened to yet we're still missing information we also have police records from federal police and provincial police we have cemetery records judicial records habeas corpus presentations we have huge amounts of information with a search engine which allows us to quickly find what we're looking for whether we look for names or whatever apart from what we already have in the national archive of memory which is digitized we're also working on looking for added material outside our secretariat in other bodies like cemeteries police forces jails services the penitentiary be federal or provincial jails prisons so we're looking for information outside because the repression was clandestine that makes it harder it means things are not clearly visible you need to dig you need to constantly look for whatever data you may find in official sources so we look for what we call documentary footprints something else we do as the unified register for state terrorists and victims is we identify disappeared people through an agreement with the argentinian group of forensic anthropology we're generating an archive of hermetic samples from relatives which are then crossed massively with the samples or profiles of all the bone findings which are being held in the forensic centers this cross-reference and means that some people who are in clandestine mass graves can be identified and therefore we can bring closure we can know where that person found his or her and also we are now working on identifying people through their fingerprints during repression very often people were murdered and they were left out in the street and the local or federal police had to identify the body oftentimes we couldn't find any identification but fingerprints were taken and then we compared the fingerprints of people to disappear because they were in their documents with the database with unknown fingerprints and there we can find new identifications oftentimes bodies are not there anymore but families get all got information about what happened to their relatives after the kidnapping and there's the imprisonment all research done and all the systematization will guarantee the right to truth of relatives and also we'll clarify the courts that are judging the criminal actions that took place during that time we'll give them more data and circumstances where that these people went through that will contribute as proof and what we tend to do now is to set up a database we call federal system of data that we wanted to be online with open free access with different levels of access courts all attorney's offices and all research groups so that people can find in that database federally nationally all the data that each territory may have because small places have more knowledge and they are closer to people in order to contribute with extra data while building all together a knowledge of what happens the idea of a unified database is the idea of a base that asks information on so that people can have access to these information this is the right that it will have to do what happened to their relatives and therefore the idea of having centralized records does not have to do it has to do with offering that information to others and I think that that's all actually this universe of data offering information that are still the two the causes that are still open all we have to answer any questions you may have thank you thank you silvia as we could see we have highly disciplined speakers who followed the time very strictly and this allows us to have some good time for a debate for q&a session we'll be stopping at 11 so we have 15 minutes ahead of us I have I think we have covered different topics but I think that there are some common characteristics in the three projects such as for example placing the victims right at the core of all these databases the challenge involved in normalizing not only the names but also normalizing places and the different repressive facts that a person may have suffered and the challenge and the opportunity of using the new technologies to capture new data to mine data that can help us give an answer to citizens the importance that we could see in the different projects the online dissemination and the social participation of the different communities relatives and people who are interested in the in the topics so that we can help expand the existing data the high the importance the high importance of dissemination focused on these the user experience this is one of the questions that francesca was posing and the importance of the primary sources having a documenter to prove each one of these victims and finally the integration in single databases of all the information sources as we were told by arison archives seeing the archive as a hub or as the as we were told by the national archive of memories seeing all the process on how the world information of the grave the identification all the documents are integrated under the same umbrella of the same database with no further ado i just presented some topics to give you some food for thoughts so that you can ask questions there seems to be a question here we'll wait for the microphone good morning shall i stand up all this way speakers will see and good morning i'd like to congratulate the three of you for your brilliant and interesting presentations there's a question with respect to from jerez just said about the primary sources i am interested to know how you approach this part of the process we find these primary sources oftentimes present contradictory information not easy to elucidate i followed with great attention what you said about identity names last names different variations of a last name that may correspond to the same person but we also have data related to the repressive existence of the person going through different levels of bureaucracy bureaucracy that may be quite negative with respect to the victims and they had not paid great care when gathering biographic personal data and things that happen on a monthly basis and they changed the dates therefore this demands an important level of research evolution i would like to know in each one of your centers how you approach this thank you who would like to answer would you like to start alexandra with your answer i'm sorry but i didn't quite understand the question exactly exactly what did you really want us to answer now you can hear me how do you approach the different challenges that this is telling us about about the primary sources that supply information that may be sometimes contradictory related to names for example or related to dates and places so how do you approach contradicted information well it seems that the sound is not too clear he said maybe somebody else could start answering he didn't quite hear he didn't quite understand the question because the sound is we're trying to to establish he says to know what happened with each one of the victims sometimes we have more information sometimes we have little information the problem is that unlike the arleson archives where most of the information comes from the concentration camps and different places in central europe we or the problem we we see is that most of the victims of the holocaust came from the east of europe and poland the soviet union romania and so on where there's a little information there are a few documents so oftentimes we have a single source about a victim and other in other times the page of testimony comes from information supplied by the family now we don't have documents coming from archives we have to understand that also that the process of the holocaust in those places was totally different in the western part of europe just were arrested and were taken from one place to the other sent through transit camps to other camps so we have documents we have the deportation list in the east of europe the killing was in the struggle in it in discriminated and there was nearly no document whatsoever so there we have many problems and we are trying to recover it names though it's very difficult i don't know if i answered your question but this is the situation that we have faith or we are facing in francisco sylvia maybe you could add something as to summarize the question how do we solve this type of problems in the case of primary sources primary documents how do we solve this contradiction apparent contradiction about certain victims how can we do that in the database or research areas thank you who starts okay then i can say three words on this topic yeah as as i mentioned before in my speech that is a problem that occurs very often in our documents and we know that it's a huge problem when it comes to the that the user themselves use the database in our reading room or the online archive but we also answer inquiries and then there we have our staff members who are very experienced and how to handle the documents how to handle the information as Alexander said context lies with information is more reliable but of course we can't give an exact answer on this on those questions we we are very aware of that and we try to give as much context information online as we could and for example we have an e-guide which explain a lot of documents and types for example Alexander showed the and have linked the the prisoner registration card from maltausel and then we show what is this document who created this document what does this information means and so we want to enable the users to check themselves if the information is reliable or not but there's no thing i think there is never a chance that we can say 100 that when one this says this and one other card says this and maybe there are some relatives who say my uncle and there was his family history and we know he was persecuted as a political prisoner but our documents date them as so-called a social um that's so many different information and um yeah there's truly there's a lack of um what is what could be verified would you like to add anything else silvia or abraham i now understand the question much better now if we have documents from the times of the holocaust well what is written is not how to call it or how to say it it's just part of the bible it's not carved in stone till short ago historians considered that a document that that was from 1943 could it was what it was and it could not be argued but now um considering what we know about prisoners in different concentration camps the vast majority of records were done orally so people didn't come with their id card with all the exact data date of birth place of birth spelling of the name and last name i don't know if you remember the list this the chingeler there's a scene where we have different lines of jews that are waiting to to talk to to some employees or the german soldiers and they tell them what their names are well imagine and then we have german employees or polish employees that all of a sudden in auschwitz and in other camps meet jews from hungary or from greece unknown to with speak languages unknown to them and they speak in one way and the person writing understand what they understand so there's there are many possibilities for a mistake i'm not saying that all that is registered is an error but you can see that in the spelling of names and last names and and and sites this spelling includes many errors because these employees didn't really know what was happening you tell them the name of a place sebeck sekeschulvaheim for example and we'll see what the german employee understands that is the problem all these documents all that information has to be taken with a pinch of salt and well do we have the possibility of finding information that cannot be matched as francisco said documents is something another document is something else and sometimes you don't really know or one doesn't really know who is right and who is wrong and what is reality in that case we connect both documents having to do with the same person but not we are not even historians making deep or in-depth studies sometimes matching these informations apparently conflicting information is is hard we do our best but there's no guarantee that everything will be perfectly homogeneous i can tell you that in camps well many camps there was a we had files of the inmates and they gave him a prisoner number or an inmate number some of these people died in the camp and the same number because given to a person that came in the camp two years after so you sometimes you don't know who is who there were people that imprisoned it that took others to jail or that impersonate them sorry that that pretended to be somebody else if you take the date of birth many prisoners said that they were older or younger depending on their needs if they needed to go and work a 15 year old would say that he was 18 otherwise he would be taken to the gas chamber there are many things that are not exact the holocaust was a very complex thing which includes many new details it was a very complex reality if you would like to add anything else or there are any more questions final questions maybe we have alex here maybe you could stand up so that they can see you well two questions one very basic how many people are working in your archives what is the what is your dimension and the other question is and we cannot hear maybe you should speak it to the microphone how many people work in your archives and the other is what happens with the data protection law how do you work through the data protection law thank you could well the the question the first question is well in order to do this fantastic job you're doing digitalizing information extracting data and publishing that data well what what what are your human resources how many people work in your institutions how many people who's behind the database is more specific not the institution but the database the management of the database data extraction digitalization data structuring indexing publication etc well in the in our unified record of state terrorism we have 15 people but only working to the data system of decision and research digitalization it's another team of people we have a team of documentary funds other areas that covers other areas that are that are related but that are not working specifically working with respect to data they are not related to data gathering and i don't know what else do we have in the amount of people and the first question was the amount of people who are working around this database this is well 15 people yes 15 people in my department it's 23 24 people but now and at times we had even had 50 people five oh this will depend on the actual needs good times and or not so good times we had very intensive judgment we had a very special project related to the dormant accounts in Swiss banks that was a four month project with 1000 people who were indexing data in two shifts in two places it was it was out of ordinary and it was well it included well it included very special special it's very high funds in because the results of that project with many names were cross-referenced with the names of the beneficiaries of the dormant accounts in the Swiss banks and we found 54 000 people that had accounts in the Swiss banks that that never came from the Holocaust to recuperate their money so the families the relatives were given the opportunity to present a complaint to recover that money that was in those dormant bank accounts it basically depends on the funds that can help that you can have to to work on that right now there are like 23 24 of us and we're still working on digitization and data processing and obviously we are responding to people's requests in the case yeah we have a whole archive has approximately 200 staff members and I think 40 of them are involved in the database so in digitization indexing data processing and online publishing and the second question was about data protection when I was right so we set up this year a new data protection move for our own because we are an international organization and we don't have to focus on for example German archival law which is very strict and when we have to follow this law we couldn't work as we do it now because there are very long periods of time when you can use personal data so what we have is an amount of time of 25 years when we have requests or documents we receive from our archives and we have to focus on their archival law but when it comes to our own documents for example our own correspondence files which are available they are they can be used when they are older than 25 years so that's the only protection data protection when it comes to our original documents and only in short edition we are found by the German federal or the German government so we receive our money from the government of Germany yeah sorry I didn't make that clear enough publication from 2015 we published the details of murdered and disappeared people but not survivors that data those data are left aside the digital archive has different levels of access there is public documentation and non public documentation so we usually preserve things like torture sexual crimes there's lots of sensitive delicate information which is not open to the public yeah same for us in Yad Vashem we have sometimes information which is like medical records things like that very private those documents do not appear on internet we show metadata as for laws for private data protection I think in Israel we are a little bit more relaxed than in Europe we say your dgpr but as for documentation we receive from European archives yeah we have to respect European law so the general law is that if it's over a hundred years from date of birth no problem if we don't have the date of birth then I think it has to be like 60 years after the creation of the document for it to be cleared so that's what we are respecting and I think that's pretty much international standards thank you thank you everybody um this afternoon in fact we are going to have a panel on data protection for this kind of issue we're going to have Antonio Gonzales Quintana and Ari Schraba who I'm sure has worked with uh Arlesson archives and Yad Vashem I believe and he's also worked with the European agency for data protection so um now we are out of time so if there are no further questions we're going to wind up now we have some 25 minutes for coffee and we'll start our second panel punctually it will be on models for victims databases we have different representations from Spain thank you very much for your contributions they've been most interesting and hopefully we will be able to follow your example here in Spain thank you thank you very much