How this reader was made

From the archive's scans to the list of people.

The lists

The transport lists are kept at NIOD, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, in the collection of Jules Schelvis. Schelvis was deported from Westerbork to Sobibor on June 1, 1943, with his wife Rachel. He was chosen for forced labour on arrival and survived the war. Rachel was murdered. He spent much of his life researching the trains to Sobibor and the people on them.

The archive keeps the lists in numbered files. The eight files shown here, numbered 55 to 58 and 60 to 63, hold 1,624 pages. One file can hold the lists of several trains. Some pages are second copies of a list, made town by town or in alphabetical order, and some are Schelvis's own notes and letters. The front page shows where each train's list begins.

Reading the pages

Every page is shown whole, as the archive scanned it. The typed text was read by machine, several times with different programs, and each page shows the reading that keeps the most names and birth dates intact. Of these, 93 pages with handwriting, running text or difficult layouts were read again by a stronger AI model, which also translated them.

The English is a machine translation. Neither the transcriptions nor the translations have been checked line by line. Names and dates keep the spelling on the page, typing errors included. Where the text and the scan differ, the scan is right.

The people

Each name on the lists became a row in a table of people, with the birth date, address, town and train beside it. The rows were checked against the page images, and rows that disagreed with the scan were corrected.

Some people appear more than once, for example on a second copy of a list. Their entries are joined, and each person is counted once, on the train they left on. The table holds 34,218 people.

The Joods Monument

The Joods Monument is the Dutch online memorial to the Jews of the Netherlands who were murdered in the Holocaust. It has a page for each person, often with photographs, family and a short life story. Of the 34,218 people here, 29,229 are linked to their Monument page.

A link needs the same birth date and a matching name. Spellings often differ between a typed list and the Monument, so a link with a different spelling also needs a second point of agreement. That can be the same address, relatives on the same list, or a death recorded at Sobibor on the day the train arrived. Doubtful cases were checked by hand against the scan and the Monument page. Where no link could be made safely, none was made.

For linked people, the name is shown as the Monument spells it, and the spelling on the list still finds them in search. The dates of death and the family links come from the Monument.

Photographs

Of the people here, 5,586 have a portrait. Most come from their Joods Monument page, where relatives, archives and museums placed them. A few come from other archives. Captions keep the source's own words, with an English translation where one has been made.

The data

Download the full list of people as a spreadsheet (CSV). It holds every person shown here, with the file and page where each name appears.