The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau [Hardcover]

Ann Weiss (Author), James E. Young (Introduction), Leon Wieseltier (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2001

In 1986, Ann Weiss discovered more than 2400 photographs of Jewish deportees in the archives of Auschwitz. This volume represents a selection of 400 images and the stories behind them, showing those portrayed "as they were in life, not as the victims they became in death". Over a decade was spent researching the lives of the deportees represented in the photographs. Weiss tracked down friends, relatives and survivors in Europe, Israel and America.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Last Album by Ann Weiss contains images selected from a collection of about 2,400 personal photographs that belonged to Jews who taken to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The pictures were found after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. No other such collection is known to exist, because personal photographs were among the property that was systematically destroyed when Jews arrived at the camps. It is difficult to describe the experience of seeing these photographs, whose power lies in their subjects' innocence: "Regard these doomed and ferociously normal people," writes Leon Wieseltier (author of Kaddish), in his foreword to the book. The people in the pictures are relaxing at the beach, playing the piano, getting married, looking in the mirror, climbing mountains, climbing trees. Wieseltier explains what kinds of knowledge, love, and memory are at play in the experience of paging through The Last Album: "We do not know the names of the people in these photographs, but we know something just as precious, just as binding: we know the objects of their devotion, who and what they loyally loved. We have been initiated by their deaths into their intimacies. We remember what they wished to remember; and in the memory of their memory, they live." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Library Journal

When she visited Auschwitz in 1986, Weiss, a child of Holocaust survivors and a historian, teacher, and documentary filmmaker, was especially moved when she viewed the approximately 2400 personal photographsDthe last keepsakes of the murdered victimsDthat are part of the Auschwitz archive. The story of how these photos survived is a tale in itself and one that Weiss addresses in the introductory pages of her book. Weiss wanted to learn more about the stories behind these photographs, so she spent the next decade researching and interviewing survivors to identify the photo subjects. From the collection of Auschwitz photos, she has chosen a representative sampling that recaptures everyday life before the Holocaust. The first part of the book offers photographs of institutions and people involved in Jewish movements. The latter section focuses on various families, with a great emphasis on what it was like to be a young person growing up in a darkening political climate. The photos are greatly enhanced by the memories of survivors, and together they make the Holocaust more immediate and personal and less statistical and abstract. Recommended for all libraries with strong Holocaust collections.DPaul Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393016706
• ISBN-13: 978-0393016703
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 8.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #764,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Picture is worth....", February 8, 2001

By 

Steven Hess - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Hardcover)

Ann Weiss shared her pictures with me years before this important booked was published. Ask someone what they would grab if their house were burning, and upon reflection many or most would say "the family pictures." And thus it was with the Jews. As they hurriedly stuffed what they could and would preserve into a rucksack or suitcase as they were driven out of their homes and onto the cattle cars, the doomed, terrorized Jews took with them family snapshots and albums. After their blood and ashes had long been absorbed by the soil of Auschwitz, Ann Weiss discovered heaps of these photos in a dark and dusty warehouse there. Between the red tape, the logistics and lack of funding, I believe it took her years to copy these images; all that was left of ordinary and moms and dads....and sweet, sweet children. If the number 6,000,000 is too impossible to comprehend, the innocence of young bright eyes recorded in happier times puts it somewhat in perspective

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Face Is More Than a Name: The People of Bendin, May 28, 2001

By 

Alfred J. Nicolosi (Penns Grove, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Hardcover)

The whole world knows the face of Anne Frank whose life and writings have been the subject of numerous books, plays and films. But what about those nameless, faceless other millions whose voices were silenced by Nazi barbarity in a government-sponsored policy of mass murder? Ann Weiss, a soccer-mom from suburban Philadelphia and the daughter of survivors from Poland, on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1987 found, quite by chance, an album filled with hundreds of photos of families and individuals living normal lives until three days in August, 1943, when the entire Jewish community of Bendin, Poland, was transported to Auschwitz and murdered. Photos of this kind are rarer than gold, for in the words of one survivor, "They (the Nazis) didn't want to destroy us only but also all of our words, our lives, our memories. For this alone I can never forgive them." While many books about the Holocaust focus on broken remnants of the victims' physical existence, Weiss's extraordinary album restores to them their smiles, laughter and songs. With painstaking research and dedication over a period of fourteen years, Weiss learned their names and family histories. The result is nothing less than a miracle: a restoration to the world of the living, in spirit at least, of these beautiful people of Bendin whose dreams were shattered by events that seem incomprehensible to us today. In one especially touching photo, Artur Huppert holds his twenty-month-old son, Peterle, on his shoulder for the boy's grandparents with the inscription, "Healthy and strong to the age of 120. Radiant as the moon." The rest would be silence if it were not for Weiss's project of remembrance.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sad, Beautiful and Powerful book, January 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Hardcover)

What comes across most powerfully in The Last Album is that in the vast majority of these images there is nothing outwardly "Jewish" about most of the subjects. Nothing to help us understand why the Nazi's marked them. They are middle class, working class, and wealthy, and they look just like their neighbors (and most probably behaved like them, too). It was just this faith, no matter how they practiced it, or didn't. Just an accident of birth for some. I guess the point is that under other circumstances it could have been the Catholics, or Muslims (see Yugoslavia), or Albanians or Kurds. Hopefully this wonderful addition to the literature will serve as yet another reminder how easy it is for us to fall into these groundless hatreds and somehow help hold back our urges to engage in such destructive behavior.