Holocaust photos at Marcus JCC tell stories of lives lived

Those contents, hundreds of photos staring back at Weiss, photos brought to the death camp as a last vestige of life, gripped her -- haunted her -- and before Weiss’ suitcase was unpacked back in Pennsylvania, she was making plans to return to Poland to somehow copy these remnants of visual history.

More than 2,400 photos were salvaged and reproduced, and about 400 of them are displayed in Weiss’ book, “The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau.” Of that collection, 72 hang on the walls in the gallery inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.

Deciding which among the collection to excerpt for the exhibit -- which was stationed at Emory University last fall -- was “absolute agony,” Weiss said.

“I wanted every single one to be seen,” she said.

Weiss ultimately decided on photos that spoke to her personally, and she is dedicating Thursday night’s presentation at the JCC to the memory of her mother, who “lived the last week of her life” this week several years ago.

Since discovering the photos -- including striking wedding portraits and pictures of siblings posing at resorts, often for what became a final family snapshot -- Weiss has devoted herself to finding Holocaust survivors who could identify their loved ones in the prints.

“Most of the people in these photos never got a chance to share their story,” Weiss said. “These are people’s lives -- lives extinguished and lives lived.”

Weiss’ discovery of the poignant collection -- and, by extension, the hundreds of survivors she found or who located her -- can be attributed to fate or luck, depending upon your beliefs.

In her public talks, Weiss says she uncovered the photos by accident, but she is usually corrected by some attendees.

"They say it was God's will, that it didn't just happen by accident," Weiss said. "That isn't really my language, but, that being said, there have been so many inexplicable aspects of this whole project over years of discovery, it's like I'm becoming a believer that [finding the photos] was more than just some random accident."

One of those moments of discovery occurred in the mid-1990s when Weiss was giving a speech about art and the Holocaust at a conference in Tennessee.

Benjamin Hirsch, a prominent Atlanta architect, decided to attend the conference -- his first ever -- since he had been commissioned to design a Holocaust memorial in Atlanta.

During the montage, he spotted a photo of two young children in a tree and gasped.

It was the same photo he always kept in his pocket, the one of his sister Roselena and his brother Werner, 6 and 18 months old, respectively. Hirsch last saw them when he was 6 years old.

“The odds of something like that happening are tremendous,” Hirsch, 78, said this week. “Seeing that picture, it just kind of clicked.”

In December 1938, Hirsch’s mother, Mathilde, managed to get him and his four older siblings to Paris through the Kindertransport, while the little ones, too young to travel, stayed with Mathilde in Germany.

In 1943, the three were sent to Auschwitz and gassed.

Weiss is thankful she has met people such as Hirsch who can fill in the blanks of lives otherwise anonymous. Now, she says, most of the hundreds of survivors she has interviewed have died, so it will be the responsibility of future generations to scour family history.

“It’s important that I tell the stories in a way that respects the teller,” Weiss said. “I feel like I’m the repository.”

Event preview

Photojournalist and Holocaust scholar Ann Weiss discusses her photo exhibit, “The Last Album: Cherished Photographs from the Past,” and presents a multimedia lecture for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

8 p.m. Thursday. Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. Free. 678- 812.4000, www.atlantajcc.org.

Exhibit is on display through March 13.