For years the motto of many Holocaust Memorial ceremonies in Israel has been "Every Person Has a Name". The name Yad Vashem also links remembering the Holocaust with naming its victims, and giving them a face, or rather many, many faces. As Ed said this afternoon, one of the aims of Centropa is also to give memory and history a face. At the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe the same approach is used, in what I think is a very powerful manner.
As much as I have read and written about the Shoah, for me there are three faces that I think of in particular during memorial cermonies for the victims of the Holocaust. One of them is the grandfather of my wife. I don't have a picture of him on my computer so I will only tell you his name: Jacob Rozenblum, a diamond cutter, born on 14 November 1904 in Cerstochowa, Poland, murdered in Majdanek in March 1943. In my next posting I will tell you about the other two names, and show you the two beautiful faces that belong to them.
My mother-in-law, Rivka, was born in Antwerpen (Belgium) in February 1940. Her parents were Jewish refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis invade Belgium in May 1940 the three of them fled to Southern France. Rivka knew that her father had been round up somewhere and not come back, but she and her mother (who unfortunately passed away about a year before I met my wife) had no idea what happened to him. Thank G'd Rivka and her mother survived the war. Within the framework of my MA and PhD research I was able to find documents that showed exactly where and when Jacob Rozenblum was arrested, the little possessions that he had on him when he was arrested, in which camp he stayed before he was transferred to the transit camp at Drancy (near Paris), and with which transport he was deported to his death: nr. 51, on 6 March 1943, to Majdanek. You can see the page of the transport list with his name on it (the last name on the page (nr. 688) ) when you click here (the pages appear on the website of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, worth a visit if you are in Paris; this is where I did part of my research). Our youngest son, I. J., is named after him.