Digital Repository
The digital repository of remembrance compiles, creates, and processes databases using the records in the Museum Archives that contain names of former prisoners and people deported to Auschwitz. The database entry is an “electronic copy” of the original document in the Archives, and makes it possible to retrieve the needed information quickly.
These entries are based on original documents from the time when the camp was in operation. The repository staff attempt to identify the greatest possible number of prisoners registered in any particular series of camp numbers, record their names, and recover their stories.
At first in 1991, a special program, making it possible to create separate databases, search them in various ways, and produce reports that could be printed out, was used.The system we use now was launched in 2015. The digital repository contains approximately 1 million personal data entries. Those records comes from 108 archival collections. More than 600 thousands of scanned images of original documentation were attached to the data base. It represents at least 260 thousands individual inmates and deportees to KL Auschwitz. Prisoners data have been published on the Auschwitz Memorial web site in 2015. The new search tool that added a possibility of searching transports was introduced in 2024 - https://victims.auschwitz.org/
In the 2002 awards for Museum Event of the Year, the “Digital Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim” project received honorable mention and a Sybilla statuette from the hands of the Minister of Culture.
The databases now serve as the foundation for a multimedia educational project designed for study groups, and especially school groups, visiting the Auschwitz site. Examples of these presentations include The Fate of Young People in Auschwitz: The Case of the Maurerschule (Bricklayers’ School) Students and The Fate of Auschwitz Prisoners: The Case of Block 4 in the Main Camp. Accounts by former prisoners are used to reconstruct the course of known events in the camp. The presentation also includes paintings, sketches, documentary and contemporary photographs, and statistical analyses of the material in the databases.
