Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002 | 8:26 a.m.
In 1939 a man named Roman Neumark posed with his wife and young daughter for a casual family portrait in a park.
In the photograph the daughter is smiling. She is standing in front of her parents, leaning into them, holding their hands. Her father is dressed in a suit coat and tie. Her mother, Regina, is wearing a skirt and coat.
The Neumarks lived in Poland and owned a bicycle store in the town of Bendin.
Four years after this picture was taken, the family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps.
It was as definitive as that for Jews in Poland. A young family in a park one day. Victims of Hitler another.
The photograph was confiscated from whomever carried it into Auschwitz. It was supposed to have been destroyed, as had been millions of photographs taken from Jews, Gypsies and other prisoners, in an attempt to erase any memory of the victims.
But in 1986 Ann Weiss, a Pennsylvanian who was touring Auschwitz, came across a startling discovery: More than 2,400 personal photographs brought to Auschwitz by Jews from the Bendin Ghetto had survived.
The photos had been kept and concealed by Jewish inmates. Forty years later the pictures of smiling friends, families, Zionists and students sat in a locked room at Auschwitz, hidden from public view.
Knowing she had stumbled on something remarkable, Weiss contacted government authorities and was granted permission to copy the pictures. For some of the victims, it was all that remained.
"My reaction was how sacred those photos were," Weiss said from her home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. "How laced with love they were."
More than 100 of these photos are on display at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center and the Charleston Heights Arts Center through Nov. 16.
The pictures are a typical reflection of a person's journey through life. They are personal snapshots of vacations taken, strolls through the city, store fronts, friends visiting with one another, playing cards, families at picnics, couples posing, children on beaches.
There is a boy wearing knickers and a sweater, looking down at a sister whose hand he is holding. Two girls are seated together in a wicker chair with a dog in their lap. There are studio portraits of dashing men and beautiful women.
With the exception of the yellow star worn by some in a number of photographs, there is little hint of the atrocities that lay ahead.
"The photos were chosen by the individuals themselves who felt these photos were the most-cherished photos," Weiss said. "The photos they couldn't live without. The photos they had to bring with them when they didn't know where they were going."
Of the Neumarks, Weiss said, "The photo was taken when nobody dreamed that somebody was going to kill this child and her parents."
Finding a history
Weiss is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, Israel and Canada, lecturing on the photographs and the stories behind them -- stories of pastry-shop owners, rabbis, teachers and families.
Weiss produced and directed a movie about the photographs. Last week she was in Las Vegas to discuss the photos and sign copies of her book, "The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau."
Through the help of survivors, a few hundred of the photographs have been identified.
Sometimes, Weiss said, identification is made possible when she screens her movie and someone in the audience recognizes a family member, neighbor or friend in the photographs.
Other times she sits with groups of survivors as they flip through the pictures.
"When we begin there's a sense of extraordinary anticipation," Weiss said. "As we go further and further sometimes we're very lucky. Sometimes were not lucky at all. When we're not lucky it's almost like a fresh grief.
"When we find somebody we're grateful there's a photo and we miss that person again. There wasn't a photo. Now there is a photo. More often than not what we have is nothing. We have a wound that's opened."
To Weiss, and others, the photographs not only represent the memory of victims killed during the Holocaust, the photographs enable others to identify with Holocaust victims.
People are often able to distance themselves from the dehumanized emaciated prisoners in concentration camps, Weiss said.
"This is at the level where people can relate to something like this," she said. "The Holocaust is so evil, I don't think a normal person can understand it.
"I want people to understand that this didn't happen to some (distant) group. These were normal people who were going on vacation, raising children, falling in love, getting married. People doing just both the ordinary and the extraordinary in life."
Death camp
At Auschwitz many arrivals were sent immediately to gas chambers. Others were worked to death. Some were tortured. Some were used for medical experiments.
In 1944 and 1945 with the Soviets encroaching, the SS evacuated thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz and sent them to other camps. In 1945 Soviet troops liberated the ones who remained at Auschwitz.
Weiss, who has worked as a writer, librarian and researcher, said it was serendipitous that she would be the one who would encounter the photographs of victims from Bendin Ghetto.
"I have to at some point say I found these for a reason."
While touring Auschwitz, Weiss said she was overwhelmed by what she was seeing and stayed behind while the rest of the private tour group moved on with the guide.
"I was looking at this enormous pile of shoes that were left in the last few days of killing. When they said 'the killing was down to a trickle.'
"The shoes were taken off the dead and slipped onto someone not yet dead. If you had a pair of shoes it meant you had a chance to live a little bit longer. It was many many thousands of shoes.
"I didn't notice the whole rest of the (tour) group had gone on," Weiss said.
Suddenly realizing that she was alone, Weiss said that she panicked.
"I began running from gallery to gallery, room to room, building to building, desperately looking for somebody, anybody alive," she said. "I was pretty scared. I didn't want to be alone in Auschwitz. I didn't want to be in Auschwitz at all."
She ran toward a noise that she heard in the distance. There she saw a museum staff member who motioned for her to come toward her. The staff member asked Weiss if she'd like to see what was in the locked room.
Weiss said she doesn't know anything about the woman, or why she decided to show her the photographs in the room.
Speculating, Weiss said, "I think her first impulse was to do the right thing."
Eventually a few members from the tour group found Weiss looking at the photographs, then joined her. As a man from the tour turned the pages, he landed on a page that featured a photograph of a little boy.
"I could barely breathe," Weiss said. "All I could say was stop. His face was so beautiful. So innocent.
"It was so painful to have the page turn and he be in the darkness again. In every way he deserved to be in the light."
Perseverance
When Weiss returned to Philadelphia, she said she knew she had do something to publicize the photographs so the world could see them.
"It didn't go so easily," Weiss said. "It took a long time to get access to the photos. I started under the communist government. Ultimately I did (get access). Once I had agreement with the communist government. I had to sign agreements with post-communist government."
But the perseverance, Weiss said, paid off.
"The collection touches people whether they have this personal history or not.
"We live different lives. Do different things. But the one thing we have in common is that we're human and we know what it means to love. They had aspirations. They had hopes. There was no sign that their life would be cut short."
archive
