How Yad Vashem protects the world's Holocaust memories

That thought crept up on me when I was shown around, hearing of plans to build a six-storey, maximum-security bunker — only one and a half storeys visible, the rest below ground — due to be opened in time for Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2024.

The thought returned as I was ushered into an operational centre where, around the clock, technicians watch a bank of screens showing attempted breaches of Yad Vashem’s digital defences.

Yad Vashem is second only to the nation’s government as the Israeli institution most frequently under cyber-attack. On a central screen the electronic bombardment was tabulated: Malware, Content Violation, Advanced Threats. Another display measured “named viruses”.

Those in charge were cagey about who was raining fire on them, but Yad Vashem is clearly the target of choice for a global army of anti-Jewish extremists and Holocaust deniers, determined to hit the memory bank of the Shoah.

And yet more striking than the threat is the response. What I saw at Yad Vashem was an almost obsessive effort to collect, protect and preserve every shred of evidence of what can credibly claim to be the greatest crime in human history.

First, the staff guard what they have already accumulated: a collection of 224 million pages of documents (tens of millions of which are original hard copies), 535,000 photographs, 44,600 artefacts and 13,650 pieces of art.

There’s that digital war room, access to which is granted to only a select, authorised few.

But there’s also the laconic answer from Michael Lieber, the 60-ish chief information officer of Yad Vashem, to this question: how do you ensure this archive remains intact even in the face of cyber onslaught? Laconic because, as Lieber puts it, “we don’t want to give pointers” to those who intend Yad Vashem harm. “The first step is to have a very good back-up.”

In Yad Vashem’s case, that means an electronic set of duplicate copies held away from and unconnected to the internet, out of reach of hackers.

It means storage “on tape”, held in a system defiantly offline. It also means relying on not just one bank of servers, but several, dotted around the country.

Still, the danger is not just of elimination, with hackers breaking in and destroying the digital archive. There’s also the risk that, once in, they won’t simply press delete but rather attempt something subtler and more invidious.

They might try to alter documents, change photographs or tweak numbers, using advanced technology to doctor the historic record. What was to stop them from, say, adding a fictitious face to the image of senior Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg or subtracting a zero on a crucial document, thereby reducing the death toll at a camp?

Haim Gertner, who, having run Yad Vashem’s archives division, is now in charge of the institution’s international relations, tells me this is the new danger of the digital age.

“Someone can take a document and manipulate it. They can add to it, colour it, cut things, give it a different context. This is a new era now and we are not alone in this … fake news is everywhere.”

I ask him what Yad Vashem is doing to guard against the risk. Gertner answers with a smile. “We keep the originals.” That way, you can always compare and be sure.

The result, however, is that those original documents — whether they be the diary of a Jew in a ghetto or the correspondence of a Nazi bureaucrat — have to be guarded like precious jewels. There are cameras in every room.

Each vault is climate-controlled. A red pipe runs overhead, punctuated by sprinklers ready to activate in case of fire.

The documents are held in sealed boxes, designed to insulate their contents against water damage. In time, the sprinklers will be replaced by valves which, in the event of a blaze, will release fire-retardant gas.

When you stand in one of those vaults with Gertner you understand why he and Yad Vashem go to such lengths. There is a box containing a set of index cards from Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, one for each inmate.

I stop at the one for Abraham Lipot, a Jew from Ungvar, in Hungary, examining the card that charts his journey through the machinery of Nazi extermination, learning that he was taken to Auschwitz on 1 June, 1944, then moved on a week later, until he finally reached Mauthausen.

It records in neatly typed lines his marital status (single), his height, the colour of his eyes, even a description of the shape of his nose: gebogen, bent or hooked. “This is evidence,” says Gertner. “This is evidence, of course, of the murder.”

Next the archivist points to a handwritten Jewish calendar, compiled and hidden by an inmate in Buchenwald. The captive “risked his life” to do it, says Gertner: if he was caught, “it would have been a murder sentence.

But he did it because it was important for him and for the rest of the inmates in Buchenwald to know that today is Sunday not Monday. Because if you know today is Sunday, you are a human being. And if you know tomorrow is Pesach [or Passover], then you are a Jew.”

It is only then that I spot a set of cardboard boxes in a cabinet, behind glass. They are clearly labelled and on them is a name so familiar, it makes me shiver: Oskar Schindler.

Inside one of those boxes is the register of people saved by Schindler, the Nazi who developed a conscience and used his power to employ Jews in his factory to save their lives. Inside those boxes is the actual piece of paper: Schindler’s list.

But Gertner does not simply guard what Yad Vashem has. The institution wants more, its appetite for tangible proof of the Holocaust voracious.

With pride, Gertner notes that the collection has quadrupled in the last decade. It has researchers scouring libraries, archives, family basements and attics in Europe — like the one in the home of a British soldier, a liberator of Mauthausen, where those index cards were found. They hunt down any document they can find.

There are 40 teams at work in Eastern Europe, making digital copies of archives held there: if a library in Poland or Romania doesn’t have the specialist equipment for that task, Yad Vashem will pay for it and leave the kit behind as a gift.

Gertner estimates the collection is adding as many as 15 million pages of documents each year through this scanning operation.

But it’s happening on “the mountain”, too. In one room, staff are at work on table scanners, placing documents on a black desktop board, positioning an overhead camera and capturing images for the digital archive. These are annotated, catalogued and then, where possible, made available to the public online.

Gertner marches into the paper preservation lab. Here conservators in white lab coats, hands gloved, work to save the originals that he is so determined to keep.

One of them is concentrating hard on a typewritten letter, sent originally by a Jew caught up in the Shoah.

The conservator is running a delicate strip of white ribbon along an edge: “Japanese paper”, designed to strengthen the letter so that it won’t tear. Next to her is a jar containing methyl cellulose, a reversible glue that allows anything stuck to be unstuck. Carefully, she smooths out the creases of the letter, dampening it slightly so that the fibres of the paper can be straightened.

She works with a set of fine scalpels and rulers that would not look out of place in an operating theatre. The effort of those restoring a Rembrandt or Vermeer could hardly be more meticulous, all for a single letter from an ordinary woman to her family.

Gertner is very clear that the object of this labour is to preserve the documents exactly as they are. “We are not fixing them. We are preserving them and keeping them, so they will not deteriorate but will be with us for generations to come.”

Each stage of the conservation is documented and catalogued: inoculation against any future allegations of forgery. The shadow cast by the deniers is never very far away.

Next comes the Digital Media Lab, one wall of which is filled with screens, like the gallery of a TV studio during transmission, each showing a different image.

Several are talking heads, old people speaking in various languages. Slowly it becomes clear that these are interviews with Holocaust survivors, recorded ten, 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

Some might have been done professionally, perhaps by a news organisation. But many are amateur, filmed by a local school or family member.

The technicians here are converting recordings from formats fast becoming functionally obsolete — VHS, Betamax, U-matic, cine film — into digital files with a longer life expectancy.

Meanwhile, a large, highly specialised machine is scanning old microfilm, page by page, at a clip. If a Holocaust testimony exists in any form, anywhere in the world, Yad Vashem wants it and will do what it takes to digitise it, preserve it and make it accessible.

There is something frenetic about all this industry, soon to be contained in that single, new, mostly subterranean facility, a “collections centre” that aims to bring the storage, conservation and preservation efforts together under one supremely well-equipped roof, so that what Yad Vashem has now will be maintained “in perpetuity”.

The intensity of activity makes sense. For Yad Vashem’s guardians are fighting multiple threats. One is time. Or, more precisely, mortality.

They know that soon there will not be any direct survivors of the Holocaust left. Until now, the simplest, most visceral proof of the Shoah has been the testimony of those who witnessed it first-hand. Won’t their imminent absence allow the deniers to advance?

Yad Vashem is preparing for that day, and so are others around the world. The Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California, the bank of survivor interviews established by Steven Spielberg after his success with Schindler’s List, is working on adapting some of those countless hours of video testimony into holograms.

I learn about this from David Silberklang, a senior historian at Yad Vashem. It is true, he concedes, that a hologram could easily be dismissed as a hi-tech forgery. “Anything can be faked,” he says.

Yet technology offers other possibilities. Just as carbon-dating can separate genuine from bogus archaeological finds, so Silberklang expects equivalent tools will become available “to expose the fakes”.

By recording every interaction made with an item of digital information, and keeping that record across several computers, blockchain technology could provide a reliable guide to the provenance of digital documents. That in turn could yield a system of watermarks authenticating irrefutable evidence of the Holocaust.

“We have so much of the truth out there,” says Silberklang, “I’m cautiously optimistic that the sheer volume of what we have that is the truth will prevail.” And so he and the others stand guard on the mountain, defending the historical record against anything, and anyone, that threatens it.

This is an adapted extract from ‘Seasick’ by Jonathan Freedland, available exclusively on Alexander (alxr.com) with audio narration by Richard E Grant.