KOŠICE commemorated the deaths of almost 15,000 of its Jews in Nazi concentration camps by reading aloud the names of the eastern Slovak city's known Holocaust victims on May 19.
Of the 15,000 Košice Jews who were taken to their deaths at the end of the second world war in 1944, only around 300 survived the camps.
Because there were no lists of victims who were deported, an organisation called Hiding Child decided last year to compile one, managing to collect the names of 4,590 Jews who were sent to death camps from Košice.
Hiding Child was formed and is led by those who, being children at the time of the Jewish pogroms, managed to survive the Holocaust by going into hiding.
"We've worked for over a year to collect the information from all available sources around the world," said the organisation's Eva Backerová.
As part of the commemoration act, called Everyone Has A Name, the names of the individual victims were read out loud.
Backerová said that more names to complete the list were still arriving, and that her organisation was committed to making the tragic record complete.
"Those who did not survive don't have tombs or memorials bearing their names, and they could not have saved their lives. We therefore feel the obligation to at least save their names," said Backerová.
"Numbers are only numbers. But behind every one of them there is a concrete person who had a name, a life, and an identity," added Hiding Child's Miriam Gálová.
