Marathon Session Remembers Victims of the Holocaust and Genocide

Jena Neuscheler, left, and Tara Porter, right, along with other members of the Duke community, read the names of genocide victims throughout the day and night as part of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 7th through April 8th on the Bryan Center Plaza.

Students from the Jewish Life at Duke and the Muslim Student Association organized Duke’s Holocaust Remembrance Day 2013, which took place over a period of 24 hours starting Sunday, April 7, at 6 p.m. and ending on Monday, April 8.

Senior David Estrin, who founded The Coalition for Preserving Memory@ Duke University, and his team designed events to give life to the memory of genocide victims throughout the world including ones from Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.

More than 200 student, faculty and staff volunteers took turns reading about 50,000 names of victims over 24 hours, which doubled the hours of reading held last year. Estrin put that number in perspective in emails explaining the death pits and ovens of Auschwitz incinerated the corpses of as many as 24,000 men, women and children a day. 

For more information about the project, click here.

Photos by Megan Morr/Duke University Photography. Pictured below: the list of names read during the ceremony.

 

Ribbons commemorating the victims of the Rwandan (purple), Holocaust (yellow), Darfur (green), Armenian (white), Cambodian (red) and Bosnian (blue) Genocides, were given out during Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 7th through April 8th.