"The Last Album"

by Debra Auspitz

Art

In 1986, Bryn Mawr resident Ann Weiss took a trip to Poland that changed her life. Separated from her tour group at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Weiss was invited by an employee to step into a room normally locked to visitors. Inside she found a treasure: 2,400 family photographs taken from the camp's victims. When people were sent to camps, they were told to pack a suitcase of their most precious belongings. Photographs were one of the most common choices. "The people who brought these photos did not think they were going to die," Weiss says. "These are the cherished images that when they thought they were being taken somewhere to work, they couldn't be without." A Nazi edict demanded that all personal photos brought to camps be immediately destroyed -- in fact, Weiss learned in her research that Auschwitz had a separate crematorium just for destroying photos. A survivor who had been part of an underground resistance movement at the camp told Weiss that the resistance's leader had arranged for this group of photos, taken from one of the last large transports of Polish Jews, in 1943, to be saved and hidden. They remained undiscovered until after Auschwitz's liberation in 1945. Haunted by these images, Weiss made it her mission to bring the photos to the world. After much negotiation, Weiss was able to convince the Polish government to allow her to return and photograph the collection for exhibition in the States. She has since published a book, The Last Album: Eyes From the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Norton), to accompany her traveling exhibition of the photographs, which comes to the Gershman Y this week.

Weiss is very clear on how her mission differs from many exhibits on the Holocaust: "Instead of focusing on death, I concentrate on life." The now-iconic images of emaciated prisoners or piles of decaying bodies serve to teach the world about this darkest of periods, but they can also unwittingly place viewers in the same position as those who perpetrated these atrocities, by reducing the victims to symbols and taking away their humanity. When "people have been brutalized to the point of almost not looking like people, we can't even imagine that those individuals had lives like ours," Weiss says. The words "never forget" have become a mantra about the horrors of the Holocaust, and exhibits like Weiss' can help us remember another important truth: Though the people in these photos are known to us only in death, at one time, they also lived.

“The Last Album,” shown in conjunction with Margaret Rutherford’s "Budapest Stories," Sept. 21Nov. 21; presentation by Ann Weiss on Sun., Sept. 21, 3-5 p.m., The Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3027.

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