J-Wire: Yad Vashem using AI to restore memory of Holocaust. “Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem announced Sunday that it has started using state-of-the-art AI technology including a new image detection capability to help comb through the world’s largest archive documentation of the Holocaust.”
Axios: Fortnite is getting an unofficial Holocaust museum . “The virtual building, called the Voices of the Forgotten Museum, will let players walk its halls to read plaques describing the genocide against Jews in Nazi Germany and see photos of Jewish resistance fighters and heroic individuals who sheltered Jews. While Fortnite is typically used as a cartoony multiplayer competitive shooting game, visitors to the Museum, which will be offered as a separate, peaceful experience, will not be able to play the game inside it.”
BRNO Daily: New Online Database Presents Wartime Testimonies of Czech and Slovak Roma. “The stories of Roma survivors from the Czech and Slovak Republics about their experience during World War II are now available on Svedectvi Romu, an online database launched today, symbolically, on International Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the Czech Academy of Sciences has announced. The website will eventually contain around 250 testimonies, with both Czech and English versions of the database.”
Radio Prague International: Recordings from trial with “chief symbol” of Nazi occupation K. H. Frank being restored. “Archivists at Czech Radio have discovered 1,300 discs of recordings from the 1946 trial with Karl Hermann Frank, who was in charge of the Nazi security forces during the wartime occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The discs are currently in the process of digitisation, making it possible to play the sounds for the first time in more than 70 years.”
USC Shoah Foundation: New IWalk Takes Users on Virtual Tour of 1941 Babyn Yar Massacre Site. “Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year.”
WFMJ: Digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies available on Youngstown Jewish Federation Website. “Newly digitized recordings of the testimonials of Holocaust survivors are now available on the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation’s website. The Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council teamed up with the Mahoning Valley Historical Society to digitize numerous analog audio and video recordings of these testimonies contained in the Dr. Saul Friedman Collection.”
Balkan Transitional Justice: Fractured History: Why Kosovo Has No Proper Wartime Archive. “The Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms is still the main repository for records produced by various individual human rights activists in Kosovo from 1989 to 1999. Over the last two decades, very little has been done to collect archive materials related to the war. Since the war ended, the Kosovo State Archives hasn’t managed to create any proper archival collection. The head of the State Archives, Bedri Zyberaj said that the materials it holds related to the war are photographs and some articles from foreign newspapers about the conflict.”
NHK World Japan: Ukraine reports over 240 cases of damage to cultural heritage by Russian forces. “Ukraine says it has documented at least 242 instances of Russian occupiers’ war crimes against cultural heritage. Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy on Saturday revealed the numbers. By region, 84 instances were reported in Kharkiv, 45 in Donetsk and 38 in Kyiv.”
Washington Post: In Ukraine’s Mariupol, a website for the missing reveals war’s toll. “A 76-year-old woman, last seen in her basement, is shown smiling in front of a bed of tulips. A missing teenager who may have fled with neighbors is pictured in a dress holding a bouquet. Then there is the elderly couple whose house burnt down in the fighting. And a mother-son duo not heard from in a month. These are just a few of the hundreds of notices users have posted over the past week to a new website aimed at tracking the missing residents of Mariupol, the southern Ukrainian port city Russian forces have besieged for much of the war.”
Bloomberg: Russia Wages Social-Media Campaign to Label Bucha Massacre a Hoax. “Russian politicians, foreign embassies and state media accounts on Twitter Inc. with hundreds of thousands of followers tweeted the term ‘Bucha’ more than 1,000 times last week, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonprofit which has been tracking Russian disinformation relating to the war. The campaign was an attempt to manipulate public discourse surrounding the events that unfolded in the Kyiv suburb early this month, according to researchers.”
Bellingcat: Russia’s Kramatorsk ‘Facts’ Versus the Evidence. “On April 8, 2022, a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile struck the main railway station in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of government-controlled Ukraine. The missile killed at least 50 people, including five children. Civilians had gathered at the station to flee the approaching Russian offensive, which has pivoted to the country’s east in recent weeks…. Russian officials have blamed the strike on Ukraine, citing claims that the Russian military does not use the Tochka-U.”
Business Insider: Ukrainian prosecutor investigating potential Bucha war crimes says that Russians left behind a computer server that could help identify perpetrators. “The chief regional prosecutor in Bucha, Ukraine, told the New York Times that Russian soldiers left behind a computer server with potentially damning information as investigators are zeroing in on killings and mass graves in the city.”
MSNBC: Why Russia doesn’t need its lies about Ukraine to be believable. “I’d assumed photos and videos documenting the atrocities would be censored in Russia, that President Vladimir Putin’s regime would pretend the video doesn’t exist rather than confront the magnitude of its crimes….I was wrong. Rather than hide the images from the Russian people, the government has been working overtime to advance a much more chilling narrative, one aimed at persuading people not to believe their eyes.”
WIRED: The Race to Archive Social Posts That May Prove Russian War Crimes. “IN EARLY APRIL, as Ukraine started to regain control of Bucha and other small towns northwest of Kyiv, appalling imagery began to spread on Telegram and other social networks. Photos and videos showed bodies in the streets and anguished survivors describing loved ones, civilians, killed by Russian soldiers. In Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, attorney Denys Rabomizo carefully built an archive of the gruesome evidence. His aim: to preserve social media posts that could help prove Russian war crimes.”
Government of Ukraine: Dmytro Kuleba: Online archive of war crimes will help bring Russian criminals to justice. “Together with partners, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has created an online archive to document Russia’s war crimes. The evidence gathered here of atrocities committed by the Russian army in Ukraine will ensure that these war criminals cannot escape justice… The ministry will constantly update the archive data in cooperation with Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, international organizations and monitoring missions.”
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