Columnist Susan Snyder: Auschwitz is focus of book

Friday, Nov. 2, 2001 | 9:22 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at 259-4082 or snyder@lasvegassun.com.

Fifty-six years after Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, there is more.

More than grisly tales of 2 million people murdered. More than stark images of crematoriums and the gaunt, haunted faces of skeletal human beings peering through their captors' fences.

There is more.

There is life, and the images of how a group of people destined to die at the infamous Nazi death camp once lived it.

They are photographs from "The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau," a book by Ann Weiss, the Pennsylvania author who discovered the pictures at Auschwitz in 1986.

Weiss will be in Las Vegas this weekend to talk about the long-hidden collection of 2,400 photos.

Her free presentation is at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Chabad of Southern Nevada, 1261 Arville St. It is co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada as part of the center's fifth annual book festival.

"These photos are not photos you can distance yourself from," Weiss said in a telephone interview this week. "Black or white. Jew or Christian. They transcend any ethnicity, race or culture.

"They represent the archetype of what we lost."

Weiss discovered the cache of pictures while on a guided tour of Auschwitz in October 1986. She says she was studying something in one of the galleries and didn't realize the group had moved on without her.

While looking for her group she entered a building where a staff member motioned her into a room that typically was locked. Still alone, she was briefly shown books of photographs that had been confiscated from the last large shipment of people brought to Auschwitz from Poland in the summer of 1943.

They were grouped according to activity -- weddings, parties, school photos, picnics, athletic events.

When people were transported to death camps the Nazis had orders to destroy every memory of them, and that included photographs, Weiss said. Auschwitz had a crematorium just for burning pictures.

But somehow Polish prisoners from that summer hid more than 2,000 photos until Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945. Weiss has conducted thousands of interviews over the past decade, piecing together the stories and names behind many of the images. But she has yet to find out how the pictures were saved.

Many images stick with her, she says. One of them is of a man cradling a baby in one arm and embracing his wife with the other. He gazes at the baby; she beams at the camera.

Weiss said she long admired the photo of a seemingly happy family. But an interview with a Holocaust survivor in Florida revealed a different story. The survivor said the man was his hometown's only Jewish obstetrician, and the woman was the doctor's wife.

The baby likely belonged to a patient, as the couple could not conceive. The Florida man recognized them because the woman visited the orphanage where he grew up.

"She came to the orphanage every day to help the kids with their homework, to hug them, to talk with them, to mother them," Weiss said. "They made a family with the children who had no parents."

It's been 56 years. Yet, there is more -- to learn, know, mourn.

"We lost people like that," Weiss said.