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

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