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: ||||| From Anne Frank’s diary to Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” books about the Holocaust remain some of the most powerful and well-known pieces of literature published in the past century. Books have the power to educate about the Shoah’s unimaginable horrors and bring to life the stories of its victims, as well as unearth hidden details about wartime crimes. 
 
 Ahead of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, JTA reached out to Jewish studies scholars across the country seeking their recommendations on recently published books dealing with the Holocaust. Their picks, all published in the past three years, include an investigation into the 1941 massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne (two scholars recommended the same book on that topic), a critical examination of theories trying to explain the Holocaust and a look at how Adolf Hitler saw Islam as a religion that could be exploited for anti-Semitic purposes. 
 
 The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) 
 
 By Anna Bikont 
 
 Joshua Zimmerman, professorial chair in Holocaust studies and East European Jewish history and professor of history at Yeshiva University, writes: 
 
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 This book, a winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, was written by a Polish journalist who discovered she was Jewish in her 30s and became deeply engaged in the topic of Polish-Jewish relations. After Jan T. Gross’ controversial book “Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland” (2000) proved that the local Poles — not the Germans — committed the massive pogrom in that town in July 1941, Bikont went to Jedwabne and its surroundings, interviewing eyewitnesses to the crime in the years 2000 to 2003, shedding new light on the character of the perpetrators, bystanders and the intricate way the crime was concealed for 50 years after the Holocaust. It is written in the form of a journal of the author’s travels and conversations with people. 
 
 Barbara Grossman, professor of drama at Tufts University and former U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council board member, also recommended Bikont’s book. She writes: 
 
 I first read about the Jedwabne massacre in Gross’ book and still remember being riveted by the cover image of a barn engulfed in flames. Perhaps because my paternal grandfather was from Łomża, Poland — a city relatively near Jedwabne — I felt a particular connection to this atrocity, as well as gratitude to him for leaving the country years before the Holocaust. I directed Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s “Our Class,” a play loosely based on the events in Jedwabne, at Tufts in 2012, and remain fascinated by this story of greed, treachery and cruelty, a horrific crime in which as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women and children perished. Bikont’s magnificent work of investigative journalism details her meticulous reconstruction of the massacre and its subsequent decades-long coverup. It is a sobering and compelling account of anti-Semitism, denial and isolated acts of heroism. 
 
 The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015) 
 
 By Lisa Moses Leff 
 
 Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, writes: 
 
 This award-winning book recounts the amazing story of Zosa Szajkowski, the scholar who rescued archives that might otherwise have been lost in the Holocaust. Szajkowski wrote numerous books and articles, but was also a known archive thief, caught red handed stealing valuable papers from the New York Public Library. Leff’s meticulous account reads like a thriller, yet conveys invaluable information concerning the fate of Jewish archives during and after the Shoah, and why removal of archives from their original home matters. Brandeis University and my late father, Bible scholar Nahum Sarna, play bit parts in this story. I remember Szajkowski, too; in fact, I took a class with him as a Brandeis undergraduate. He told lots of stories in class about his archival experiences during and after World War II, but it was only after reading Leff’s wonderful book that I understood “the rest of the story.” 
 
 Why? Explaining the Holocaust (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) 
 
 By Peter Hayes 
 
 David Engel, professor of Holocaust studies and chair of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, writes: 
 
 I recommend this book for a lucid, well-crafted introduction to the history of the Holocaust. Unlike most works on the Holocaust written for a general audience, which tend to emphasize how the Holocaust was carried out and experienced, Hayes’ book concentrates, as its title suggests, on helping readers to understand why the Holocaust occurred when it did, where it did, in the manner it did and with the results it produced. It offers readers a window onto how historians go about finding answers to these questions, why some answers turn out to be more compelling than others and how new evidence can change understanding. 
 
 Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) 
 
 Edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner 
 
 Omer Bartov, professor of European history and German studies at Brown University, writes: 
 
 This book comes out a quarter of a century after the publication of Saul Friedlander’s crucial edited volume, “Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution” (1992), which had challenged the conventional discourse on the mass murder of the Jews and critiqued its popular representation. The current volume attempts to grapple with the wider impact of Holocaust scholarship, fiction and representation in the intervening period. It includes fascinating essays on new modes of narrating the Shoah, the insights provided by the “spatial turn” on research and understanding of the event and the politics of exceptionality, especially the contextualization of the Holocaust within the larger framework of modern genocide. As such, it enables readers to understand both the ongoing presence of the Holocaust in our present culture and the different ways in which it has come to be understood in the early 21st century. 
 
 Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Belknap Press, 2014) 
 
 By David Motadel 
 
 Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, writes: 
 
 This is a major work of scholarship, examining the various ways the Nazis fostered a relationship with Muslims both before the war and especially during the war. Jeffrey Herf wrote a book a bit earlier, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” detailing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda sent, in Arabic translation, to North African Muslims, and Motadel expands the range of influence: that Hitler understood Islam as a warrior religion that could be exploited for propaganda efforts and to serve in both the Wehrmacht and the SS. The indoctrination of Muslims with Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda may well have had effects lasting long past the end of the war, a topic that deserves additional attention. 
 
 My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past (The Experiment, 2015) 
 
 By Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair 
 
 Michael Rothberg, professor of English and comparative literature and chair in Holocaust studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes: 
 
 Teege’s memoir, published in German in 2013 and translated into English in 2015, is a fascinating contribution to the discussion of the ongoing impact of the Holocaust over multiple generations. When she was in her late 30s, Teege discovered that her grandfather was a Nazi war criminal. And not just any Nazi: he was Amon Goeth, the commandant of Plaszów depicted in the film “Schindler’s List.” Because Teege is herself a black German woman — the daughter of a Nigerian father and a white German mother who was herself the daughter of Goeth’s mistress — her story takes on additional resonance. Intercut with contextualizing passages by Sellmair, a journalist, Teege’s memoir both confronts historical conundrums about race, reconciliation and responsibility for the past, and offers glimpses of very contemporary questions about the contours of German identity. Her earnest reckoning with family and national history can inspire us all to reflect on what it means to be implicated in histories of racial violence, even those we have not participated in directly. 
 
 They Were Like Family to Me: Stories (Scribner, 2016) 
 
 By Helen Maryles Shankman 
 
 Jeremy Dauber, director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, writes: 
 
 Writing literature about the Holocaust is many things, but it is never easy; and writing Holocaust literature in the vein of magic realism is more difficult yet. It risks taking the great horror of the 20th century and rendering it ungrounded, imaginative, even — God forbid — whimsically slight. But when a skillful writer pulls it off — David Grossman, for example, and now Shankman — the fantastic casts illuminating and terrible light on the dark shadows of the history of the war against the Jews. The stories in her collection are by no means factual in all respects. But they contain unmistakable truth. ||||| People stand still on the Mediterranean Sea beachfront as a two-minute siren sounds in memory of victims of the Holocaust, in Netanya, Israel, Monday, April 24, 2017. Israel is holding its annual Holocaust... (Associated Press) 
 
 People stand still on the Mediterranean Sea beachfront as a two-minute siren sounds in memory of victims of the Holocaust, in Netanya, Israel, Monday, April 24, 2017. Israel is holding its annual Holocaust remembrance day in memory of the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.... (Associated Press) 
 
 JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel came to a standstill on Monday as people stopped in their tracks for a two-minute siren that wailed across the country in remembrance of the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims. 
 
 The ritual is the centerpiece of Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day for those who were systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Pedestrians stood in place, buses stopped on busy streets and cars pulled over on major highways — their drivers standing on the roads with their heads bowed. 
 
 In homes and businesses, people stopped what they were doing to pay homage to the victims of the Nazi genocide, in which a third of world Jewry was annihilated. 
 
 A wreath laying ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial followed, with Israeli leaders and Holocaust survivors in attendance. A public reading of names also took place in Israel's parliament, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders recited names of relatives who were killed. Other ceremonies, prayers and musical performances took place in schools, community centers and army bases around the country. 
 
 The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel's calendar. Restaurants, cafes and places of entertainment shut down, and radio and TV programs are dedicated almost exclusively to documentaries about the Holocaust, interviews with survivors and somber music. The Israeli flag flew at half-staff. 
 
 Israel was established in 1948, just three years after the end of the war, and hundreds of thousands of survivors fled there. Some 160,000 elderly survivors remain, with a similar number worldwide. With the passing years, and the dwindling in numbers of survivors, greater emphasis has been put on commemorating their individual stories. 
 
 The central theme of this year's commemorations at Yad Vashem is "Restoring Their Identities: The Fate of the Individual During the Holocaust." 
 
 The Holocaust memorial called on the public to share testimony and provide more names of those who perished. To date, Yad Vashem's Shoah Victims' Names Project has collected over 4,700,000 names of the victims. 
 
 "It is a race against the clock to collect as many names of those murdered during the Holocaust before there are no more survivors left," said Alexander Avram, the director of Vad Vashem's Hall of Names. 
 
 At the opening ceremony on Sunday night, Netanyahu spoke about what he said was the world's indifference to the genocide of the Jews in World War II and how Israel is the guarantee the Jewish people will never be that weak again. 
 
 "The lesson is that we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves, against every threat, against every enemy," he said. 
 
 President Reuven Rivlin took a different approach. He said although the Holocaust is "permanently branded in our flesh" it "is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future." ||||| AUSCHWITZ – A delegation of officials from 11 European Union countries pledged their commitment on Monday to Holocaust commemoration, at the annual International March of the Living ceremony, which took place at the Birkenau death camp on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. 
 
 
 
 After lighting one of the memorial torches, Austrian Federal Minister for Education Dr. Sonja Hammerschmid, who led the delegation of education ministers and officials, read out a declaration stating: “We take upon ourselves the solemn commitment to remember and to commemorate the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the Roma Genocide, as well as other Holocaust-related mass atrocities. We shall respect the survivors still with us and honor those who resisted the evil of Nazi tyranny. 
 
 
 
 
 
 “We will commit to combating all expressions of Holocaust denial, antisemitism, antiziganism and any form of racism or intolerance,” she continued on behalf of the delegation, expressing their vow to strengthen the commitment of their peoples and governments to sharing the history of the Holocaust.Also lighting a torch was Elisha Wiesel, son of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel, who participated in the march for the first time.“My father never forgot. The things he saw stayed with him all the days of his life. He lived to speak of them to me and to my children. My father was a witness,” Wiesel said.“He was a witness to the worst atrocity that man has ever unleashed on fellow man. And he was a witness who believed that to acknowledge the suffering of another – and to have them feel less alone – was an imperative for every human being. He spoke for victims around the world: Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur. The thought that genocides could occur in the wake of the Holocaust haunted him.“But my father was a witness to more than the Holocaust: he was a witness to the Jewish lives in Eastern Europe, which it had claimed. He was a witness to his parents’ beliefs and their traditions and their values, some of which continued even in this place, even in that time – the father and son saving crusts of bread for each other, the rabbis condemning God at trial and then praying the evening prayer,” he said.March of the Living chairman Dr. Shmuel Rosenman told the gathering: “Elie Wiesel, who was with us on our very first March in 1988, said, ‘If you listen to a witness, you become a witness. His words have become a central goal of the march – to create the next generation of witnesses from among our young people so the stories and lessons of the Holocaust are never, ever forgotten.”As every year, the march was led by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and a survivor of the Buchenwald extermination camp, who delivered opening remarks at the ceremony.“We will come here every year to remember, remind and tell the stories of the living legends of the Holocaust,” he said.Following him was IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who led the IDF delegation.“By holding this March of the Living, we, the commanders and the soldiers of the Israeli military, will always be their voice,” he said. “Such bloodshed will never be repeated thanks to our strong and powerful army, forever committed to ensure it. We will never forget!” Eisenkot also mentioned the parents of missing IDF soldier Lt. Hadar Goldin, who participated in the march.Goldin and Sgt. Oron Shaul were killed in action in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014 and their bodies are being held by Hamas as a bargaining chip. “We won’t rest until their son is returned,” said Eisenkot.Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett shared with the audience his family history: his grandparents’ families were murdered in the gas chambers and his wife’s grandmother was the sole survivor of her family. Holding up a piece of fabric embroidered by his grandmother’s sister in Poland before she was killed, Bennett said it hangs in his office as a reminder “to be a proud Israeli and a proud Jew.”This year’s event was dedicated to the memory of Holocaust survivor Joseph Wilf, the first North American president of the March of the Living, who died last year.Lighting a memorial torch, Holocaust survivor and ongoing march supporter Edward Mosberg paid tribute to Wilf, whom he described as a “great friend and mentor.”Mosberg was accompanied by his granddaughter, and both wore the striped uniforms prisoners were made to wear in the Nazi camps.Mosberg explained that his wife, an Auschwitz survivor, was unable to join him, and, therefore, his granddaughter was wearing her uniform in her place.Mosberg’s entire family was killed in the Holocaust and he delivered an impassioned speech.“My Holocaust Remembrance Day is every day of my life. I did not forget for one second the murders they committed on my family.When I get up in the morning I see them,” he said.Some 10,000 people from around the world took part in the March this year, walking the three-kilometer path that connects Auschwitz to Birkenau in a silent tribute to all the victims of the Nazis and their collaborators.This year, youths from more than 40 countries participated in the march, some 6,500 of whom are Jewish. The youths were accompanied by an honorary delegation of 75 Holocaust survivors from different countries, the eldest of whom is 103 years old. ||||| Guests watch a video of U.S. President Donald Trump as he addresses the 15th Plenary Assembly of the World Jewish Congress in New York City, U.S., April 23, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid 
 
 Guests watch a video of U.S. President Donald Trump as he addresses the 15th Plenary Assembly of the World Jewish Congress in New York City, U.S., April 23, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid 
 
 WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump said anti-Semitism should be defeated and called the Holocaust the "darkest chapter of human history" in a video address on Sunday, following two missteps by his administration regarding statements about genocide during World War Two. 
 
 "The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror and the loss. Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide. They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe, and that the human heart cannot bear," Trump said in a speech to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York on Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day. 
 
 "On Yom HaShoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history," Trump added. "We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: 'Never again.'" 
 
 In January, on international Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Trump administration statement failed to mention Jews, the overwhelming majority of those who were killed in concentration camps under Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. 
 
 Earlier this month, White House spokesman Sean Spicer triggered an uproar when he said Hitler did not sink to the level of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by using chemical weapons. 
 
 Spicer later apologized after his comments aroused criticism on social media and elsewhere for overlooking the fact that millions of Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. 
 
 Trump's four-minute message included somber references to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, a commitment to support Israel and a rebuke of prejudice and anti-Semitism. 
 
 "We must stamp out prejudice and anti-Semitism everywhere it is found. We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel’s destruction," Trump said in an apparent reference to Iran. 
 
 (Reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley; Editing by Peter Cooney)
– It's an unforgettable number—6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust—but it's accompanied by a less known one: 4.7 million. The latter is the number of victims whose names we know thanks to the efforts the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has made since 1954. And on Monday, which marks Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, the focus is on bolstering that count before it's too late. More on that effort and the day: The BBC follows one 89-year-old woman as she fills out a "Page of Testimony" that will add the name of her father to the roster of known names. In October 1944 he conveyed a message to the women's camp at Auschwitz, asking that any survivors from his hometown of Khust, Czechoslovakia, be told that "200 men were brought back from the coal mine. Tell them that tomorrow we won't be here anymore." The BBC's article notes that roughly 95% of Western and Central European Jewish victims have been named; but the figure that represents Eastern Europe Jewish victims is far lower. Only about half the 1.5 million child victims are named. Says one man who works with survivors, "It's one of the saddest things. We have reports where parents are named with say three or four children, unnamed. They were little children and people just don't remember." For two minutes on Monday, Israel commemorated the day as it does: by sounding a siren that wails for 2 minutes. Things freeze during that time, the AP reports, with cars not just puling over on major highways, but with drivers exiting their cars and bowing their heads in observation. The Jerusalem Post reports on another annual gathering that coincides with Holocaust Remembrance Day: the International March of the Living. Since its start in 1988, some 250,000 people have on this day walked the roughly 2-mile path linking Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland. This year saw 10,000 participants, and the march chairman had this to say: "Elie Wiesel, who was with us in our very first March in 1988, said, 'If you listen to a witness you become a witness.'" "We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: 'Never again.'" So said President Trump in a video address to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York. Reuters notes the president garnered some negative press after not referencing Jews in a January statement on international Holocaust Remembrance Day. Haaretz tweets that "reading a book is always an act of Holocaust remembrance." It links to an article that rounds up scholars' picks for the seven best books on the subject published in the last three years.