Dozens of Polish high school students are slated to become virtual pen pals with their Israeli peers as part of a project called Relationet, which involves Polish students in Israeli efforts to locate the living relatives and friends of Holocaust survivors.

The expansion of the project was set in motion by the person who developed it: Zvi Schwartzman, who is in charge of Internet enterprises for the Afeka College of Engineering in Tel Aviv. Schwartzman returned from Poland a few days ago - in time to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day today in Israel - after arranging to have the project include 16-year-olds from schools in Warsaw and Lodz.

Hundreds of 11th-grade students in central Israel have been taking part in Relationet for the past two years; they have interviewed Holocaust survivors, and put up their stories - as well as photos of family members killed in the Holocaust - on blogs.

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As a result of the information put on the Internet, said Schwartzman, dozens of Holocaust survivors have located relatives, friends and acquaintances.

The next few years constitute history's "last window of opportunity" for the dwindling number of living Holocaust survivors, said Schwartzman, whose mother is numbered in that group. He said the Internet era has given the approximately 300,000 survivors - 80,000 of whom are living in Israel - a newfound hope of locating long-lost family and friends.

Schwartzman hopes that getting Polish high school students involved in the project will help survivors acquire additional information, as the youngsters will be able to do some footwork that cannot be carried out online.

"After students in Israel collect the testimony of a Holocaust survivor, as well as pictures, addresses, memories and names of acquaintances from Poland, all the information will be transferred to the Polish schools," said Schwartzman. "The students from Poland will go with this information to the same street where the Holocaust survivor lived, photograph the street and its surroundings, photograph the house or residential building in which he lived, and perhaps most important, will try to interview the neighbors.... The buildings in Lodz have remained almost intact and were not damaged. In Warsaw the situation is a bit more complicated, because a lot of the houses were destroyed."

The principals of the Polish schools whose students will now be participating exhibited a great deal of interest in the project, Schwartzman said. He is scheduled to fly back to Lodz in the next few weeks to explain the project to about 20 teachers, who will in turn instruct their students on their role.

Each blog will be run by two Israeli students and two Polish students simultaneously, with the goal of developing a more complete picture of each survivor's past. The more details the blogs contain, the greater the survivors' chance of locating the people they used to know, say the project coordinators.