The Last Album: Lives in Memory, continued

    What are these photos?
    They are the most cherished photos carried into Auschwitz-Birkenau by Jews who were deported there. Although millions of personal photos were carried into Nazi death camps by people forced out of their homes, virtually all of these photos were confiscated and destroyed, according to Nazi order, at Auschwitz and all the other Nazi camps. Millions of photos were brought and millions were destroyed, together with their owners. This collection alone remains, and the stories of their owners, a treasured legacy.
    The photographs were hidden during the war—exactly how, we don’t know—and afterward they became part of the museum established at the camp by the Polish government. There they remained over the years, in large ledger books, not unknown exactly but forgotten, or ignored.
    Before I had unpacked my suitcase from that first trip, I began to plan my return to Auschwitz—to negotiate a way to copy the photographs and share them with those who had not been in the locked room. This I managed to do, eventually, and in several trips between 1988 and the early 1990s, I copied the 2,400 photographs in the collection. Some of the photos were used in a video that I made in 1989 and in a traveling photo exhibition that has been or will be shown in Europe, Canada, the United States, and the Middle East. The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, published earlier this year, includes 400 of the photographs from the collection.
    Unlike most Holocaust accounts, which of necessity tell the story of death, The Last Album tells the story of the life. Before they became victims, they were people living their lives. And it is these lives we see depicted in the photos they carried: Holidays, family vacations, children going to school, sweethearts falling in love, weddings, babies.
    When they were forced out of their homes, they grabbed their most precious photos. And it is these photos that I saw for the first time, by accident, in a locked archive in Poland decades later. It is these photos with which I have traveled the past 15 years, searching the globe for their rightful owners, and their identifications and stories as well.
    Although I had hoped to find my own family in these photos, that did not happen. Yet something else, quite remarkable, did: These photos began to feel like family. Even from strangers who had no personal history with the photos, I heard the same comment again and again: These pictures look like my own family album.
    Throughout these many years, the most remarkable moments of the project have been those times when I was able to reunite people with photos—in some cases, the last photos—that belonged to their family. In many cases, these are the photos that no one knew even existed.
    A few such stories follow:

Cvi Cukierman
and the Gayleh Rifkeleh
Pastry Shop

Binim Cukierman (center) with his brother Avram (left), and a friend.

When my photo exhibition was in Michigan, a woman asked me, “Do you know who this is?” The man, son of a prominent family in Bendin, Poland, who owned the most popular pastry shop in town, had been identified to me many, many times before. Instead of just listening politely and letting this Holocaust survivor tell me the story (again), I turned to her in frustration and admitted, “Yes, he has been identified many times, but I have never met anyone from the family.” She beamed at me, and said, “That’s because there is only one person left in the world, he lives in Israel, and he’s my friend!”
    The next week, I was on a plane to Israel, and I met Cvi Cukierman, the last member of the original Cukierman family. He was the nephew of the man in
the photo, Binim Cukierman, a much beloved figure in the town. Binim was a baker by profession, but he loved to have a good time, and every day, at 2:00 (having started work at 4:00 in the morning), he took off his apron, got himself spruced up, and went to meet friends. Sometimes he went to the sports club, where he was a talented soccer player. Sometimes he played violin in the orchestra, or played cards with his friends. Other times he would ski or swim or hike, often taking his young nieces and nephews on vacations with him. Cvi remembers learning how to ski at the famous resort of Zakopane with his uncle.
    Cvi’s personal history is both dramatic and heroic. He made a daring escape from a Nazi concentration camp, knowing that if he stayed much longer, he would surely die. His uncle and cousins, both prisoners in the same camp, survived only a few more weeks. Later Cvi made his way to the Middle East, smuggling himself through borders, and swimming the last few miles when the British refused to allow his ship to enter. He fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, side by side with his Palmach commander, Yitzhak Rabin, and helped to get food to the starving people in Jerusalem during the siege. He married his sweetheart, Minna, also a survivor of the Holocaust, and together they created a new family. When he thinks of his murdered family, he looks around his table now, filled with children and grandchildren, and he declares powerfully, “This is my revenge on Hitler!”
    When I brought him the photos of his family, including his father, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, he shed the first tears he has shed in 50 years, and said to me, “You have released my tears. Now I can show my family who I am, who I come from. Now I can die a rich man!”

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