Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alice Simon

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 23:10, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Alice Simon

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Alice Simon (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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While the death of Alice Simon, like the many other victims of the Holocaust, is tragic, I just don't see how she is a notable victim out of the millions of Jewish people who were murdered. She seems to only be mentioned for being one of the 86 people whos remains were included as part of the Jewish skull collection, which seems to be the actual notable topic here. I don't know if her name warrants being a redirect to that article. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:23, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To elaborate:
WP:NPERSON in its opening paragraph says subjects of standalone bios should be "remarkable" or "significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded" I don't think any of the sources currently in the article substantiate this. Holocaust memorial bios are by design to humanise the otherwise faceless ordinary people who were subject to mass murder, and I don't think they confer notability for that reason. The Times of Israel and Milwaukee articles are about a personal family story of non-notable people, and don't indicate that Mrs. Simon is notable. The book "Personal Names, Hitler, and the Holocaust" only includes Mrs. Simon as an "example" regarding personal names of the people in the Jewish skull collection, which is the primary topic of the passage. I feel uncomfortable to have to write this out, sorry if any of this comes of as insensitive, I'm not trying to be. Hemiauchenia (talk) 07:35, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply
]
I appreciate your sensitivity, and I would have been inclined to !vote delete without additional sources that seem to offer more than how this article appears to have originally been written. I reviewed the edit history of the article and it looks like there was a lot of coatrack material that obscured the actual subject, but I think further editing can continue to enhance the focus on her.
For example, the 1994 and 2015 Milwaukee Journal articles (assuming the 1994 article can be accessed) could be further incorporated into its own section, to describe the efforts of her family to discover her history - while it is not necessarily unusual for people to learn of a history like this, the story of learning about her was subject to attention and recording, and it seems distinct from the skeleton collection.
I am not sure which Times of Israel source is being referred to, but I found this TOI blog/interview that includes (Google translated from French) "With the presentation of the life paths of Alice Simon, Elizabeth Klein, Jean Kotz, Ichay Litchi, Frank Sachnowitz or Adalbert Eckstein who perished in this place, I consider that I have taken the exact opposite of the Nazi theory according to which the individual is nothing and the people is everything. Because, by telling their story and their journey, it is their dignity as human beings that we restore to all these people gassed between these sinister walls." This seems to be identifying her biography as having significance, at least according to (translated) "Dr. Raphaël Toledano [...] co-director with Emmanuel Heyd of the documentary film Le nom des 86." I have not searched for French-language sources, but the documentary suggests there may be more coverage (e.g. reviews), and is another indication of her story being found significant enough to deserve attention.
There are also at least two sources that note her conversion to Protestantism - the first book in my comment below notes only her for this, and the Milwaukee Journal also notes this and extends on the noteworthiness by following the efforts of her Protestant family members to uncover their Jewish history. So from my view, there are several threads of her biography that have been found "significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded", and the article can be further refined to clarify the focus on her. She appears to be covered as more than an "example", and the context appears to be (e.g. the coverage of how difficult it was to identify the 86 and for her family to know her history) that a lot of this history is lost, and it can be significant when the biography is found. Beccaynr (talk) 17:15, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.
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