The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Weiss, Ann

ISBN 10: 0393016706 / ISBN 13: 9780393016703

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001

About this Item

224 p. Illustrations. Index. Introduction by James E. Young. FOreword by Leon Wieseltier. In 1986, Ann Weiss discovered more than 2400 photographs of Jewish deportees in the archives of Auschwitz. This volume represents a selection of 400 images and the stories behind them, showing those portrayed "as they were in life, not as the victims they became in death". Over a decade was spent researching the lives of the deportees represented in the photographs. Weiss tracked down friends, relatives and survivors in Europe, Israel and America. The author was the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Good in very good dust jacket. Ex-library. Usual library markings. First edition. First edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Bookseller Inventory # 66219

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of ...

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, New York

Publication Date: 2001

Binding: Hardcover

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Though the Nazis ordered every personal photograph brought to every concentration camp destroyed, to obliterate not only the victims themselves but also their memories, the photographs on one transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 survived. In 1986 in a locked room at Auschwitz, Weiss (U. of Pennsylvania) found over 2,400 photographs of Jewish deportees from across Europe, and here presents over 400 of them. She has identified as many as possible and transcribes many of the accounts she has heard, but asks readers who make new identifications to contact her. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Review:

The Last Album by Ann Weiss contains images selected from a collection of about 2,400 personal photographs that belonged to Jews who taken to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The pictures were found after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. No other such collection is known to exist, because personal photographs were among the property that was systematically destroyed when Jews arrived at the camps. It is difficult to describe the experience of seeing these photographs, whose power lies in their subjects' innocence: "Regard these doomed and ferociously normal people," writes Leon Wieseltier (author of Kaddish), in his foreword to the book. The people in the pictures are relaxing at the beach, playing the piano, getting married, looking in the mirror, climbing mountains, climbing trees. Wieseltier explains what kinds of knowledge, love, and memory are at play in the experience of paging through The Last Album: "We do not know the names of the people in these photographs, but we know something just as precious, just as binding: we know the objects of their devotion, who and what they loyally loved. We have been initiated by their deaths into their intimacies. We remember what they wished to remember; and in the memory of their memory, they live." --Michael Joseph Gross