On a bleak February day in 1944, a French gendarme snatched a pair of dolls from two Jewish sisters about to be deported to Auschwitz, and flung them to the ground. 
 
 Denise and Micheline Lévy, aged 10 and 9 when the gendarme bundled them out of their school in the eastern French village of Gemeaux, never returned. 
 
 But a family in the village looked after their dolls for three generations and kept alive the story of how the two little girls were lined up in the snow with their parents, grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a cousin and other Jewish families. 
 
 Frédérique Gilles, a teacher from Gemeaux whose grandmother carefully preserved the dolls, on Sunday presented them to the Holocaust museum in Paris, the Shoah Memorial. 
 
 The gendarme left the dolls — one pink and the other blue — lying in the street, where a village shopkeeper picked them up and gave them to Mrs Gilles’ grandmother. ||||| shoah 
 
 Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2017 7:12 am 
 
 Friday, Jan. 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz by Red Army troops in 1945. As Noah Lederman discovered, not all sites of the Shoah are remembered. 
 
 Growing up, I had always heard the names Otwock and Karczew. Both are neighboring towns near Warsaw. 
 
 Before the Holocaust, Otwock was home to some 14,000 Jews. Karczew had about 500 Jewish residents and became home to a Nazi forced-labor camp during World War II. 
 
 While both places may have little name recognition around the world, in my family the names loomed large. They were as common to all of us as the names of Poppy and Grandma’s murdered siblings. 
 
 My grandparents had grown up in Otwock. They fled to the Warsaw Ghetto following the summer of 1942, when they were teenagers, after the Nazis had murdered 12,000 of the 14,000 Jews living in their town. 
 
 Years later, having survived the war and immigrating to the United States, my grandparents had children. They raised their two kids as best they could, often falling back on their Holocaust stories. But because of these grim bedtime tales, my father slept with a packed suitcase beneath his bed. The Nazis, he assumed, would inevitably storm his Brooklyn apartment. My aunt developed an eating disorder. Nightmares were constant. 
 
 But Poppy and Grandma learned from their mistakes — by the time the grandchildren were around, their Holocaust stories were reduced to whispers. Discussions about Otwock, Karczew, the ghettos and the camps were off the table. Though I constantly pressed them for stories, they kept silent. 
 
 In 2004, however, I traveled to Otwock. I discovered the four synagogues had been dismantled, the town hall had no records, Grandma’s street had vanished from the map, the supposed “Jewish Center” had no Jews. 
 
 While the trip was disappointing, my visit broke Grandma’s silence. For the next six years, Grandma shared her stories. I also interviewed other survivors, pored through texts, wrote to tracing services, begged for records and watched my grandparents’ Shoah Foundation testimonies. 
 
 The research left me with questions unanswered — there were, I realized, concentration camps without records and histories that vanished without a trace. 
 
 Karczew was among those mysteries. In April 1942, 400 Jewish boys from Otwock were sent to a labor camp set up in Karczew. The “Karczew Boys,” as they were known — Poppy, my grandmother’s father and two brothers, among them — dug irrigation channels. But once the murders happened — 4,000 Jews were massacred in Otwock’s forest, in addition to the 8,000 who were rounded up and sent to Treblinka’s gas chambers — they received new orders: Bury the dead. 
 
 My grandparents eventually escaped Otwock, ending up in the Warsaw Ghetto. They nearly died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and were later persecuted in Auschwitz and Majdanek. 
 
 But at least these places had museums or memorials. Even Otwock, a town that forgot its Jews, was mentioned in American Holocaust museums and in literature documenting the Nazis’ crimes. 
 
 Facts on Karczew, however, seemed nonexistent. 
 
 In 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum tasked researchers with creating an encyclopedia that would be the most comprehensive, single-source record to document the thousands of Nazi-established persecution sites. At the time, they estimated 5,000 sites existed, including forced labor camps, military brothels, ghettos, POW camps and concentration camps. 
 
 But by 2001, their estimate doubled. When all seven volumes are published, the “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945” will contain more than 42,500 sites that the Nazis had used to persecute, exploit and murder their victims. 
 
 “Quite frankly,” Geoffrey Megargee, the project leader told me, “you could put it much higher than that.” 
 
 According to a 2013 New York Times article on the project, “The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, ‘Germanizing’ prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.” 
 
 Two volumes have been published, totaling nearly 4,000 pages and more than 2,200 camps and ghettos. 
 
 These discoveries shocked me. Last year, I started writing an article about the project. For the story, I would travel to Germany and visit some sites. Since only two of the seven volumes have been published, I asked to preview forthcoming entries. I asked for Karczew, which will be part of Volume 6, slated for publication in 2020. 
 
 The entry was shocking. Poppy’s name — Leon Lederman — appeared in the text. I changed my itinerary to include Poland. I had to stand in the horrifying place where my grandfather, barely out of boyhood, worked past exhaustion as a gravedigger. 
 
 I stood along the fence at the locked Karczew cemetery, staring at the assemblage of Jewish tombstones atop the hill. I was grateful it was protected but saddened I couldn’t visit the graves. (I was told the key had gone missing.) By contrast, the Jewish cemetery in Otwock, hidden deep in a red pine forest, where tipped tombstones were accompanied by smashed beer bottles and deserted campfires, had no gate. 
 
 Since my first visit 12 years before, Otwock had made some changes. A stone was placed to remember the site of one synagogue, now a shopping mall; another stone memorialized 2,000 Jews killed at one location in the forest. There was also a small museum with a modest exhibit about the local Jews. (It had actually existed in 2004, but none of the residents or employees at town hall, where the museum had originally been housed, knew about it.) 
 
 This time, I met with the curator, Sebastian Rakowski. He showed me a photograph of the Karczew Boys. Somewhere in that roll call, I knew, stood Poppy. 
 
 Rakowski showed me a book he had written about the persecution of Jews in Otwock during the war. It contained a a photograph of an old mill — when I reached this mill, he said, I’d be standing on the site of the Karczew camp. 
 
 I headed there by car immediately. The mill was defunct: windows smashed, concrete chipped, grass overgrown. Grapes grew in the shade like smoothed amethysts. Next to the mill was a scrap-metal yard with everything crushed beyond recognition. Fences and climbing plants hid homes, as if no one wanted a reminder. 
 
 Standing there, my family’s Karczew stories came flooding back to me: Grandma, who had hidden in the boys’ camp after her mother was murdered, once told me about the time the Nazis came searching the barracks. A small boy hid in the bunks. Grandma begged him to follow her, but he wouldn’t. 
 
 “They killed him,” she said. 
 
 I thought of Poppy’s escape from the Karczew camp during the liquidation of Otwock. He was attempting to save his family but ended up on a train to Treblinka. Using a wire he hid around his waist, however, he sawed through the bars of the cattle car, survived the fall and the Nazi gunners, and watched his friends and family journey to their deaths. He ran back to Karczew and was put to work digging graves. Until the grim task was complete, the camp was one of the last places in Otwock or Karczew where a Jew could survive. 
 
 I looked around Karczew. The barracks and irrigation channels were gone, but this time I knew the record — however small — remained. I pulled up the encyclopedia entry on my phone. 
 
 “The 400 Jewish forced laborers,” it read, “were put to work digging drainage channels along the Jagodzianka River.” 
 
 I felt chills. Poppy — an unnamed fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a Jewish teen who stuck a pitchfork through a Nazi’s neck — was no longer overlooked. 
 
 “According to Leon Lederman,” the text said, “those working in the camp were watched mainly by around 30 members of the Jewish police from Otwock.” 
 
 I tried to picture the Karczew Boys. 
 
 “Leon Lederman also recalls that when his own family was deported to Treblinka from the Otwock ghetto, a group of Jews from the Karczew camp was taken there to dig a mass grave for the Jews killed locally during the Aktion.” 
 
 I tried to imagine the horrors of that task. 
 
 “Leon Lederman also noted that [in the fall of 1942] around 300 of the remaining inmates of the Karczew camp ‘were sent to the Warsaw ghetto,’ although he says he went into hiding first for a while and then went to the ghetto.” 
 
 To read these words reminded me that Poppy mattered, and that Karczew mattered. Every single one of these encyclopedia entries — chronicling the tens of thousands of places like Karczew — all matter. They will paint a picture of what was lost — and encourage remembering by all of us. 
 
 Noah Lederman is the author of the memoir “A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets,” published Feb. 7 by Rowman & Littlefield. His articles have been featured in the Economist, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, Slate, Salon, the New Republic, Tablet Magazine, the Jerusalem Post Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He writes the travel blog Somewhere Or Bust and tweets @NoahLederman. ||||| Image caption Two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis 
 
 Giselle Cycowicz (born Friedman) remembers her father, Wolf, as a warm, kind and religious man. "He was a scholar," she says, "he always had a book open, studying Talmud [compendium of Jewish law], but he was also a businessman and he looked after his family." 
 
 Before the war, the Friedmans lived a happy, comfortable life in Khust, a Czechoslovak town with a large Jewish population on the fringes of Hungary. All that changed after 1939, when pro-Nazi Hungarian troops, and later Nazi Germany, invaded, and all the town's Jews were deported to Auschwitz. 
 
 Giselle last saw her father, "strong and healthy", hours after the family arrived at the Birkenau section of the death camp. Wolf had been selected for a workforce but a fellow prisoner under orders would not let her go to him. 
 
 "That would have been my chance to maybe kiss him the last time," Giselle, now 89, says, her voice cracking with emotion. 
 
 Giselle, her mother and a sister survived, somehow, five months in "the hell" of Auschwitz. She later learned that in October 1944 "a skeletal man" had passed by the women's camp and relayed a message to anyone alive in there from Khust. 
 
 "Tell them just now 200 men were brought back from the coal mine. Tell them that tomorrow we won't be here anymore." The man was Wolf Friedman. He was gassed the next day. 
 
 Image copyright AFP Image caption At Auschwitz-Birkenau, some 900,000 Jews were murdered on arrival 
 
 Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War Two. In many cases entire towns' Jewish populations were wiped out, with no survivors to bear witness - part of the Nazis' plan for the total annihilation of European Jewry. 
 
 Since 1954, Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem ("A Memorial and a Name"), has been working to recover the names of all the victims, and to date has managed to identify some 4.7 million. 
 
 "Every name is very important to us," says Dr Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah [Holocaust] Victims' Names. 
 
 "Every new name we can add to our database is a victory against the Nazis, against the intent of the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish people. Every new name is a small victory against oblivion." 
 
 Image caption In Western Europe, the Nazis kept records of victims, such as this Frankfurt to Theresienstadt deportation list 
 
 The institution, a sprawling complex of buildings, trees and gardens on the western slopes of Mount Herzl, gathers details about the victims in two ways: through information from those with knowledge of the deceased, and archive sources, ranging from Nazi deportation lists to Jewish school yearbooks. 
 
 Today Giselle has come to dedicate her father's name, nearly 73 years after he was killed, a small piece in a vast jigsaw. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "I never got the chance to kiss my father goodbye" 
 
 She is helped by trained staff through the process of recording Wolf's details on a Page of Testimony, a one-page form for documenting biographical information about the deceased, such as where they lived before the War, their occupation and the members of their family, and, if available, a photograph. 
 
 "Only two-thirds of the way down do we ask where they were during the war and what happened to them," Cynthia Wroclawski, deputy director of Yad Vashem's Archives Division, points out. 
 
 "We're interested in seeing a person as a person and who they were before they became a victim." 
 
 Image caption Details about the lives of millions of victims are held in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names 
 
 It is, the institution says, a kind of paper tombstone. So far Yad Vashem has collected 2.7m Pages of Testimony. 
 
 Each is stored in black boxes, each containing 300 pages - 9,000 boxes in all. They are kept in climate-controlled conditions on shelves surrounding a central installation, a 30ft-high conical lined with the faces of men, women and children who were murdered, rising up towards the sky. 
 
 Here in the Hall of Names groups of visitors pass through in quiet contemplation. There is space on the shelves for 11,000 more boxes - or 6m names in all. 
 
 With the last survivors dying out, Yad Vashem is facing a race against time to prevent more than a million unidentified victims disappearing without a trace. 
 
 This is apparent in the decreasing number of Pages of Testimony it receives - down from at least 2,000 per month five years ago to about 1,600 per month currently. 
 
 The memorial is trying to raise awareness, including among Holocaust survivors who have not yet come forward. For decades, for many of them the experience was still too painful to talk about. 
 
 "It's quite a common occurrence, not only in Holocaust survivors but survivors of prolonged and extreme trauma in childhood," says Dr Martin Auerbach, Clinical Director at Amcha, a support service in Jerusalem for Holocaust survivors. 
 
 Image caption There are spaces on the shelves for a possible six million Pages of Testimony 
 
 That began to change, he says, after about 30 or 40 years, when many survivors started talking about what happened, not with their children but with their inquisitive grandchildren. Dr Auerbach sees the Names Recovery Project as a valuable part of the healing process. 
 
 "Filling out this page of information saying this was my father, mother, grandfather, nephews and nieces - you cannot bury your relatives who perished but you can remember them in a way that will commemorate them forever, so this is very important and also therapeutic for many survivors." 
 
 While Yad Vashem has made great strides in identifying victims from Western and Central Europe - about 95% have now been named - far fewer names have been uncovered in Nazi-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, where about 4.5m Jews were murdered. 
 
 This is because while there was an organised, official process of arrest and deportation further west, in the east whole communities were marched off and massacred without any such formalities. 
 
 Image copyright AFP Image caption Only about half the victims of the Babi Yar massacre have so far been named 
 
 An estimated 1.5m Jews alone were shot to death by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) in what has become known as the Holocaust by Bullets, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. 
 
 In Babi Yar, in Ukraine, for instance, of the 33,000 Jews from Kiev and its surroundings who were slaughtered in a ravine in September 1941 in the largest massacre of its kind, about half are yet to be identified. 
 
 Others not murdered by the Einsatzgruppen died, without a trace, from starvation or exhaustion in ghettos and labour camps, or were killed in nearby extermination camps, where they had been herded without any kind of processing. 
 
 Yad Vashem is working with Jewish organisations in those countries to try to reach remaining survivors in the former Soviet Union, where the Holocaust was not officially commemorated, and who may have little awareness of the memorial's existence. 
 
 It is a massive and often complex task. The memorial holds some 205m Holocaust-related documents, which are examined meticulously in the search for names. 
 
 "There is a lot of documentation where there are names that are very scattered," says Dr Avram. "Names mentioned in a letter here or a report there. This can be very labour intensive. Sometimes you have to go through thousands and thousands of pages just to retrieve a few dozen names." 
 
 The difficulty is compounded by the fact that sources can be in 30-40 different languages, most are handwritten and can be in different scripts, such as Latin, Hebrew and Cyrillic. "Our staff not only need to be linguists but they need to know calligraphy," says Dr Avram, himself a language expert. 
 
 Image caption Pages remembering victims have been filled in more than 20 languages - such was the scale of the Nazis' reach 
 
 One of the biggest gaps is with children, of whom some 1.5 million were murdered in the Holocaust. Only about half have been identified. 
 
 "It's one of the saddest things," says Dr Avram. "We have reports where parents are named with say three or four children, unnamed. They were little children and people just don't remember." 
 
 The aim is to turn them from anonymous statistics into human beings again, like seven-year-old Edward-Edik Tonkonogi, from Satanov in Ukraine. His childish innocence and sweetness of character come across in a letter he wrote in 1941 to his parents who were travelling with a Russian theatre troupe: 
 
 Edik was murdered after the Nazis entered the town that same year. His name was later memorialised in a Page of Testimony by a relative. 
 
 As time moves on, the task of finding missing names is getting harder in some respects but easier in others. The availability of source material is greater than ever and advances in technology mean it can be a less arduous task to gather information and manipulate the data. 
 
 However, the fewer the names left to uncover, the more activity it takes to find them. 
 
 The digital age also means there are more tools at researchers' disposal than ever before. The department searching for names recently took to social media, including Facebook, in a push to reach untapped survivors. The campaign generated many new Pages of Testimony. 
 
 "When you're talking about social media you have the younger generation now understanding that those names are not in our database and trying to find out the information from their family members," says Sara Berkowitz, manager of the Names Recovery Project. 
 
 Image copyright Yad Vashem 
 
 There is another significant, sometimes life-changing, outcome of the growth of the names database, which has been available online since 2004. It has led to emotional reunions of survivors who had lived their lives not knowing there was anyone else from their family left alive. 
 
 Last year two sets of families belonging to two sisters, each of whom thought the other had perished in the Holocaust, were united after a chance discovery through the Pages of Testimony. It transpired the sisters had lived out their lives just 25 minutes away from each other in northern Israel, but passed away without ever being aware. 
 
 In 2015 a pair of half-siblings who did not know the other was alive were reunited as a result of searching the database, while in 2006 a brother and sister, one living in Canada and the other in Israel, were reunited 65 years after becoming separated in their hometown in Romania. 
 
 The project has also brought to light other, unfortunate findings. Argentinean-born Claudia de Levie, whose parents fled Germany in the 1930s, believed she had lost four or five relatives in the Holocaust. A search of the database to help with her daughter's homework revealed in fact 180 family members had been killed. 
 
 Image caption Claudia de Levie lost many family members in the Holocaust, but found new living relatives 
 
 Further research however revealed through a signature on a Page of Testimony the existence of cousins of her husband, living in Hamburg. The families now speak to each other each week on Skype. 
 
 Ironically, a chief architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, lived as a fugitive in the same neighbourhood as Claudia when she was a child in Argentina, as she would later learn. 
 
 The importance of the mission to recover victims' names received global recognition in 2013 when the United Nations cultural agency, Unesco, included the collection in its Memory of the World register. 
 
 The agency lauded it as "unprecedented in human history", pointing out that the project had given rise to similar efforts in other places of genocide, such as Rwanda and Cambodia. 
 
 Image caption Manual searches of thousands of documents might yield just a few names 
 
 Despite the millions of names recorded so far, there is still a long way to go if all six million are ever to be recovered, but those behind the project remain determined. 
 
 "I personally would like that we do reach that goal, that at least among those who perished there won't be a person who remains unknown. It's our moral imperative," says Sara Berkowitz. 
 
 "Until I sit in the office and days will pass by and I won't have work to do, I'll know that we've more or less raked the universe to try to get to every name and there is no more there." 
 
 Find out more:
– It was snowing on Feb. 24, 1944, when Jewish children in the French town of Gemeaux were rounded up at their school. Two sisters, Denise and Micheline Lévy, aged 10 and 9, clutched dolls—one pink, one blue—as they were led away to Auschwitz. A gendarme grabbed the dolls and flung them to the ground, Le Parisien reports, via the Telegraph. A shopkeeper picked them up and gave them to the grandmother of Frédérique Gilles, a 38-year-old schoolteacher, who has now donated them to the Shoah Memorial, the Holocaust museum in Paris. The dolls were among 200 items put on display Sunday, out of 19,000 objects collected by volunteers. In many cases like the Lévy sisters, they are all that remain of the deported. For two generations, Gilles' family minded the dolls. "But nobody ever played with them," she told the paper. "We knew their history." They tried to find out what happened to the Lévy sisters, but turned up no clues. Gilles said it seemed wrong to keep the dolls. "We wanted to give them to a museum, or a place of memorial." It was difficult to let them go, she added, "but it was the best thing we could do for the memory of those little girls." Over the past two years, volunteers for the Shoah Memorial criss-crossed France collecting a trove of objects belonging to those deported, including photos, a jersey emblazoned with a Star of David, a violin case, and fading slips of paper noting the Jews in hiding stacked in a little red box, reports Telerama. "Some preferred that we borrow the objects … so they could pass them on to their children," Shoah curator Lior Lalieu-Smadja told Telerama. "We understand their choice but, unfortunately, we know that quite often this evidence will be lost."