Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem signed an agreement with Poland on Monday that gives it access to World War II-era documents held in archives across the eastern European country.
The material, held in 34 state-run and provincial archives, mainly includes files produced by the Nazi German authorities who occupied Poland during the war. But some of the archives also contain materials produced by Jews imprisoned in ghettos, amounting to rare and precious wartime testimony of huge value to historians, according to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.
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In particular, Shalev said he hopes that it will help the museum, memorial and research institute in Jerusalem identify up to about 250,000 Holocaust victims in Poland who remain unidentified.
"This is our wish and we are embarking on a very ambitious project to identify them," Shalev said.
Shalev said Yad Vashem has identified about 4 million of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis. About 3 million of those were Polish Jews, and Yad Vashem still lacks names for about half of the Polish Jews and others in Eastern Europe.
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