Deciphering a Mystery: Digital Technology and the Revelation of Handwritten Texts by Marcel Nadjari and Other Members of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau

ABSTRACT

Jewish Sonderkommando's handwritten notes – found among the earth and ashes – are key documents of Holocaust history. But their degree of preservation is poor. Digital technology comes to the rescue to restore the legibility of these documents potentially lost to history. This article provides some examples of the successful application of image processing, which considerably increases the sharpness of the text. Special filters and approaches managed to increase by fourfold the number of pages from Marcel Nadjari's notes that could be read before. The deciphered fragments of Nadjari's notes not only allow us to better understand the meaning of the entire document, but also make a connection to another Nadjari text, thus yielding a new, much deeper, understanding of both the author himself, the particular fate of Greek Jews in the Holocaust, and also their role in the life and death of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz–Birkenau.

KEYWORDS:

• Sonderkommando
• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• image analysis
• manuscript reveal
• Marcel Nadjary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Pavel Markovich Polian, born on August 31, 1952, Moscow, is a geographer, historian, and philologist. He is Professor, Dr. Habil. and Director of Mandelstam-Center at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He is also senior researcher at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow and former scientific collaborator at the Universities of Freiburg, Innsbruck, Hannover, and Konstanz among others. He has authored more than 800 different publications, including forty books.

Aleksandr Borisovich Nikityaev, born 1986 in Tula, Russian Federation, is at the Tula State University. The theme of his project there is “Methods of retouching images.” Since 2008, Nikityaev has been working as a web-developer/designer in IT. Nikityaev is an IT consultant and the winner of the competition of the best techotext in 2018 on the biggest Russian, IT resource, habr.com. Nikityaev is also a blogger.