Auschwitz Memorial Remembers

The Auschwitz Memorial marked April 21 by naming Abraham Mozes Davidson, a Dutch Jewish infant born in Rotterdam in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz in January 1943. (bsky.app) The memorial’s post said Davidson was born on April 21, 1942, and was sent to Auschwitz with his mother Kornelia, father Jacob, and older sister Rieca in January 1943. The post said none of the four survived. (bsky.app) Dutch Jewish memorial records list Abraham Mozes Davidson as born in Rotterdam on April 21, 1942, and killed at Auschwitz on January 14, 1943, at 8 months old. The same record lists the family’s address as Ridderspoorstraat 71 b in Hillegersberg, Rotterdam. (joodsmonument.nl) The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum runs a victims database built from archival documents and publications on deportations to the camp. The museum says the surviving records are incomplete, and not all victims can be identified by name. (victims.auschwitz.org, auschwitz.org) The museum’s archive pages say Auschwitz records survive in fragments, including camp files, registration documents, and later additions from the Arolsen Archives project. The museum says that 2018-2020 project added more than 120,000 documents to help restore identities and biographical details of deportees and prisoners. (auschwitz.org, auschwitz.org) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem both maintain databases that assemble names and biographical details of Holocaust victims and survivors from many collections. Yad Vashem says it has recorded about 5 million names of the nearly 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. (ushmm.org, yadvashem.org) The April 21 remembrance fits the Auschwitz Memorial’s practice of tying daily posts to individual birthdays, deportations, and deaths drawn from its historical collections. In this case, the date matched Davidson’s birthdate, 84 years after he was born in Rotterdam. (bsky.app, victims.auschwitz.org) By reducing the story to one child, one family, one address, and one transport, the post used the same archival method the museum’s databases rely on: naming a victim where records still exist. The record for Abraham Mozes Davidson ends with the same fact the memorial highlighted — he was born on April 21, 1942, and was dead at Auschwitz less than nine months later. (joodsmonument.nl, bsky.app)