The Baltimore Sun
Baltimore Maryland
Sunday April 8, 2001

AUSCHWITZ ALBUM: SNAPSHOTS OF LIVES LIVED WELL:

A Moving Collection Shows Treasured Photos that Survived Those Sent to the Death Camp

by Carl Schoettler

“…L’Chaim! To Life! The irony echoes down through the years.
The bride in the photo was married in Tel Aviv in 1937..Ann Weiss … has now assembled about 400 [photos] in a new book called The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among many other things, The Last Album is in large part her personal refusal to allow a final victory to the inventors of the final solution.”

“This is an album that captures life,” she says. “Even though what we think of when we think of Jews in the Holocaust is, understandably, death…To me it was very important that the final punctuation on how they lived, not on how they died….”

“The photos that grace the book ….depict richly lived daily life forever lost except in memory, ground out like a last cigarette under a jackboot heel. Her book restores the humanity to the people the Nazis tried to dehumanize. Weis has found real, living people in the vast statistics of the Holocaust, in the anonymous boneyards of the death camps….”

“… These are photographs from a different time, when life was still good and the future horror far off. ‘They are the light which was lost,’ Weiss say. ‘But even when they don’t exist anymore, by looking at these photos of who they were and who they loved, we can see and restore the humanity of their lives.’”