Historians are still struggling to ID Holocaust victims

BUCHENWALD, Germany — The hunt begins with a number.

Harry Stein sits nose-to-screen, squinting at the fuzzy digits in column after column on faded microfilm, searching for clues to a mystery: Who was Auschwitz inmate 185403?

The number was tattooed on the left forearm of one of the thousands who were processed through Auschwitz, shipped off to Buchenwald concentration camp, and never seen again.

Male? Female? Old? Young? Jewish? Christian? Reason for arrest? The list Stein is scrutinizing says nothing. There's only that number.

More than six decades after the Nazi Holocaust ended, historians such as Stein are still struggling with a gargantuan task — to make a semblance of order among hundreds of thousands of dead by finding, at least, their names.

There is no central catalog — just miles and miles of files, scattered across Europe, the United States, Israel and elsewhere. Of 56,000 people who perished behind the barbed wire at Buchenwald alone, or on the way there, 23,000 on the camp's records remain unidentified.

The object of Stein's attention on a late autumn day is prisoner 185403. In the end, after four weeks of poring over lists, each dozens of pages long and collected from different archives, Stein will have found the name. "We have pulled out one more person," he will say. "Back from the forgotten."

But it will turn out that 185403 was not forgotten after all.

Staring at a terminal in a stark research room at Buchenwald, overlooking the rooftops of former Nazi barracks and the long sloping road leading to the camp where SS guards taunted and harassed them on their way to its gates, Stein is looking at a log of deaths dated Feb. 18, 1945 — seven weeks before the liberation.

The file was acquired by Buchenwald from the state of Thuringia's archive, one of many East German repositories of Nazi-era documents that were opened to the public after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The log lists only numbers — row after row of six-digit identity tags tattooed on the arms of prisoners who were unloaded at Buchenwald after the journey from Auschwitz and other camps in German-occupied Poland in the bitter winter of 1945.