I have visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and toured the Dachau concentration camp. I have seen photographs of thousands of prisoners — alive and dead — from many of the Nazi death camps. But nothing moved me as much as this color photograph of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka who, along with her mother, was murdered by the Nazis in 1943.
The photo was colorized by young Brazilian artist Marina Amaral, whose mission is to bring history alive with her colorization technique. Marina spoke about her work in a recent interview in the German newspaper Die Welt (my translation):
Wenn man sich ein Farbbild anschaut, fühlt man sich mit dem, was man sieht, besser verbunden. Es ist schwierig, sich mit einer historischen Figur auseinanderzusetzen, wenn du sie nur in Schwarz-Weiß siehst, weil uns das das Gefühl gibt, dass diese Person nur in Geschichtsbüchern existiert. Das ist aber absolut falsch. Die Farben erlauben es uns, eine Brücke in die Vergangenheit zu bauen. [...] Das hat die Opfer für mich realer werden lassen. Sie sind jetzt keine Nummer mehr aus irgendeiner Statistik. Jetzt sind sie Menschen aus Fleisch und Blut wie du und ich.
(“When you look at a color photo you feel much more of a connection with what you are viewing. It is difficult to deal with a historical figure when you just see it in black and white, because you feel that he/she exists only in the history books. But that is absolutely not true. Color permits us to build a bridge to the past. [...] My work makes the victim much more real to me. Now she is no longer just a number or an abstract statistic. She is a human being of flesh and blood just like you and me.”)
You can read more about Czeslawa here.
After her arrival at Auschwitz, Czesława Kwoka was photographed for the Reich's concentration camp records, and she has been identified as one of the approximately 40,000 to 50,000 subjects of such "identity pictures" taken under duress at Auschwitz-Birkenau by Wilhelm Brasse, a young Polish inmate in his twenties (known as Auschwitz prisoner number 3444). Trained as a portrait photographer at his aunt's studio prior to the 1939 German invasion of Poland beginning World War II, Brasse and others had been ordered to photograph inmates by their Nazi captors, under dreadful camp conditions and likely imminent death if the photographers refused to comply.
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