My least favorite part of Sunday School was when we were corralled into the social hall to watch filmstrips about the Holocaust. Mostly all I remember from those mornings was a thick rise of heat in my chest and a sickening thud in my stomach as I looked at the mounds of stacked skeletons looming large on the screen in front of me. Nothing about the scenes looked like they could possibly be real, but Mr. Gewertzman, Mrs. Stern, Mrs. Weil and the other teachers always begged to differ. These, they said, were our people. This, they said, was our shared history.

I grew up during the 50’s and 60’s in a Reform Jewish family in the middle of Kentucky. I didn’t know anyone who’d been in the Holocaust, nor did I know anyone who knew anyone who had. (When I was older and more curious, I learned that relatives of my father’s father - who had immigrated from Poland long before the war – were likely killed; letters from them had simply stopped arriving.) Of course, I read Anne Frank’s diary and learned basically as much as I could stomach during school (sadly, this was not a hot topic in middle or high school in Lexington, Kentucky at the time). Eddie’s parents and other relatives, who became my family when we married, were Jewish refugees from Romania. But my real lessons in the history of the Holocaust began later, when Eddie and I became close friends with a family whose parents, aunts and uncles were all survivors. Our friends’ father had co-founded the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE) in Kansas City, and we became supporters. I realized I wanted to know more, much more. I asked the executive director of MCHE if I could make portraits of some of the local survivors and gift them to the organization. She liked the idea, and my journey began. With her help, I embarked on a project that - at long last - deepened my understanding of the Shoah. (Shoah is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” and is the term used for the killing of nearly six million Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.)

The concept soon mushroomed. Another photographer, David Sosland, was brought on board, and together with interviewers and an editor, we collaboratively began the project known as “Portrait 2000.” Fifty Kansas City Holocaust survivors were asked to participate. David and I photographed them, interviewers recorded their stories, and in 2001 the Kansas City Star published our work as a book entitled “From the Heart - A Mosaic of Memories.”

The survivors I photographed became my teachers. Many of them also became my friends. I learned not only the unimaginable truth about their struggles, the destruction of their families, their pain and their loss, but also about their strength and determination to begin again. Even about the joy many of them decided to carry in their hearts as they moved forward. And unbelievably, about their refusal to be consumed with bitterness and hate.

As my new friends told me about the concentration and death camps, I realized I needed to learn even more. It wasn’t long before I was on a plane to central Europe to see the camps for myself. I made photographs at eight different locations over the course of two trips.

Here I’ll share some of my work from “Portrait 2000.” In my next blog I’ll write about the photographs I made at Birkenau, Auschwitz, Dachau, Terezin, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Plaszow and Majdanek. In the post following that, just before Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I’ll tell you about one of my survivor friends, Sonia Warshawski, about whom a movie called “Big Sonia” was made. I was the still photographer for the film.

Pictured above is Iser Cukier.

Pictured below are:

Ida Loeffler
Molly Nagel
Kate Lebovitz
Eugene Lebovitz
Bronia Roslawowski
Ann Jacobson
Ann Federman
Tola Cukier
Joseph Greenbaum
Sonią Warshawski
Sigmund Mandelbaum
Sam Nussbaum
Isak Federman