Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

"The last Album" by Ann Weiss is well organized and well written. It contains 400 remarkable
photographs that were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau by victims in 1943. These photographs were taken
prior to the Holocaust and depict people bursting with life. This is an extremely unique book, and contains material that was lovingly researched for a period of 15 years. The beauty of this book is that the
photographs and the research accomplished brings to life people that were lost during the dreadful time of
the Holocaust. The book like the author is soft, sweet, articulate and brilliant

After reading this book, I feel this should be in every house in every country. You hear so much about the people and the numbers killed that sometimes it doesn't seem real but this book makes it very real. The pictures are so powerful and at the same time so ordinary - they could be pictures of anyone's parents or grandparents. The most haunting pictures are those of the children - you have to wonder how many survived. The stories of the survivors bring it all home - "There's the aunt of the little girl I used to babysit", etc. I found it amazing that these pictures did survive 40, 50 years before being discovered again. Anyone who denies the Holocaust happened should read this book and then try to still say it never happened. Thank you Ann Weiss for bringing these pictures and the stores behind them out of the darkness.

This book is an amazing piece of history. The fact that so many photos brought into Auschwitz have survived is phenomenol as all personal effects were automotically burned by the Nazis murderers. When viewing the photos in this book, which were brought in by those of the Sosnowiec-Bendzin transport, it would also be advisable to read Tadeusz Borokowski's book "This way to the gas ladies & gentleman' as this book covers the particular Sosnowiec-Bendzin transport and outlines in gruesome and terrifying detail what became of many of those on this transport. The photographs bring back to life many who are gone and also tells you those who survived, which is a relief to realise that some of those from the Polish ghettos made it. These photos bring back a lost world that will never return and along with Roman Vishniac's collection of photographs are a piece of history that is very much worth investing in.

This book should be required reading/viewing for those who claim that all books about the Shoah start to sound the same after awhile. Each person, survivor or victim, was a unique individual with a past, a family, hopes and dreams, a local community, and friends. Unlike most of the photos which accompanied their owners to the camps, this stash of photos miraculously survived to tell the pre-Shoah story of the people of the Polish towns of Bedzin and Sosnowiec. Though there are some photos which are not of people from those areas, such as the Huppert family from Olomouc, the former Czechoslovakia, and little Roselena and Werner Hirsch from Frankfurt, the vast majority lived in the vicinity of Bedzin and Sosnowiec. We see all types of people in these photographs--Hassidic, secular, schoolchildren, teenagers, young couples, families, people on holiday, people at work, babies and small children, the elderly, Zionists, Socialists, people with their pets, men in Army uniforms, and parents with their children. I hope Ms. Weiss decides to publish the remaining 2,000 or so photos which weren't included in this book, since it left me wanting to see all of them! In many cases, sadly, the people in the photographs, or the people who brought the photographs with them, did not survive, but some of them did, and the stories of some families and individuals are told in the second half of the book. The first half focuses on the religious, social, and cultural life of Bedzin and Sosnowiec, such as the various schools (both religious and secular), local Hassidic groups (some of whom I'd never heard of, such as the Sochoczewers and the Alexsanderers), the Zionist movement, and the history of the community. Ms. Weiss also tells us the story of how the photos were saved, how they came to Auschwitz a second time in the Fifties, how she discovered them, and how she painstakingly copied all 2,400 of them and went about trying to identify the people in them.

Instead of presenting us with a tale of horror and showing us pictures of emaciated Muskelmänner or piles of dead bodies, the tragedy of the Shoah is told here through showing us what was lost. All of these people had much happier days, with hopes and dreams for their futures, people who loved them, and happy home lives. Looking at the pictures really brings home how little children like David and Renia Kohn, Roselena and Werner Hirsch, and the numerous children in the Cukierman family were never able to grow up and have their own little children or adult lives. It makes the idea of six million deaths seem more personal, looking at images of these people in more innocent times, when they couldn't have even dreamt something so diabolical would happen to them. Instead of being thought of as nameless, faceless dead bodies, they are remembered the way they wanted to have been, smiling, happy, innocent, and just going about their daily lives.

As far as I'm concerned, 'anonymous' and vernacular photography is some of the most powerful art that has ever been created and I have four favorite titles: American Photobooth, Many Are Called (By Walker Evans), Least Wanted-100 Years of Mugshots, and The Last Album. Yeh, I know. Walker Evans is famous. However, all those people on the subway are anonymous. In the first three books, we can view those faces and see sadness and pathos but we can also see humor, love, affection, dignity, and whimsy. Since all we have in those books is one photo of a person and we know nothing else about him/her, we are free to construct a future for that face. In The Last Album, we are denied that option. We know what happened to those faces and that they did nothing to deserve their fate. We also know who murdered them. We are left with horror, sadness, and anger and the sure knowledge that behind every abstraction like 6,000,000 dead, there were six million living and loving people who were brutally murdered. I would hope that those faces give us the resolve to stand up in the face of bigotry and persecution and constantly remind ourselves that those 'damned (and fill in your own blank here)' are men, women, and children who share our hopes and dreams and deserve the right to do so.

I read this book by chance, yesterday, Memorial Day 2003.
Been crying.
It's like Schindler's List or Sophie's choice.
How could they do it?
How can we let them continue doing it?
The animals still are around us, although using another names, another symbols, another motivations.
I kept reading, hoping to find some of the people to be safe at the end, but almost everybody was killed.
Binim, Rozak, Mayer, Bronka, so many of you.
I miss you, my friends.

I was glad to see and read about all these people. They needed to have their story told or at least be recognized. Having read many books on the holocaust I still found myself heartbroken to see the photos of the young children who died.So many years ago but still so profound.