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

Rating:
Summary: The Last Album
Review: "The last Album" by Ann Weiss is well organized and well written. It contains 400 remarkable
photographs that were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau by victims in 1943. These photographs were taken
prior to the Holocaust and depict people bursting with life. This is an extremely unique book, and contains material that was lovingly researched for a period of 15 years. The beauty of this book is that the
photographs and the research accomplished brings to life people that were lost during the dreadful time of
the Holocaust. The book like the author is soft, sweet, articulate and brilliant

Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading
Review: "The last Album" by Ann Weiss is well organized and well written. It contains 400 remarkable
photographs that were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau by victims in 1943. These photographs were taken
prior to the Holocaust and depict people bursting with life. This is an extremely unique book, and contains material that was lovingly researched for a period of 15 years. The beauty of this book is that the
photographs and the research accomplished brings to life people that were lost during the dreadful time of
the Holocaust. The book like the author is soft, sweet, articulate and brilliant

Rating:
Summary: The Last Album
Review: "The last Album" by Ann Weiss is well organized and well written. It contains 400 remarkable
photographs that were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau by victims in 1943. These photographs were taken
prior to the Holocaust and depict people bursting with life. This is an extremely unique book, and contains material that was lovingly researched for a period of 15 years. The beauty of this book is that the
photographs and the research accomplished brings to life people that were lost during the dreadful time of
the Holocaust. The book like the author is soft, sweet, articulate and brilliant

Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading
Review: After reading this book, I feel this should be in every house in every country. You hear so much about the people and the numbers killed that sometimes it doesn't seem real but this book makes it very real. The pictures are so powerful and at the same time so ordinary - they could be pictures of anyone's parents or grandparents. The most haunting pictures are those of the children - you have to wonder how many survived. The stories of the survivors bring it all home - "There's the aunt of the little girl I used to babysit", etc. I found it amazing that these pictures did survive 40, 50 years before being discovered again. Anyone who denies the Holocaust happened should read this book and then try to still say it never happened. Thank you Ann Weiss for bringing these pictures and the stores behind them out of the darkness.

Rating:
Summary: "A Picture is worth...."
Review: Ann Weiss shared her pictures with me years before this important booked was published. Ask someone what they would grab if their house were burning, and upon reflection many or most would say "the family pictures." And thus it was with the Jews. As they hurriedly stuffed what they could and would preserve into a rucksack or suitcase as they were driven out of their homes and onto the cattle cars, the doomed, terrorized Jews took with them family snapshots and albums. After their blood and ashes had long been absorbed by the soil of Auschwitz, Ann Weiss discovered heaps of these photos in a dark and dusty warehouse there. Between the red tape, the logistics and lack of funding, I believe it took her years to copy these images; all that was left of ordinary and moms and dads....and sweet, sweet children. If the number 6,000,000 is too impossible to comprehend, the innocence of young bright eyes recorded in happier times puts it somewhat in perspective

Rating:
Summary: A Sad, Beautiful and Powerful book
Review: Having had a chance to read some of the book before it is out to the general public, one can already convey the feelings of shock that it conveys. As do many books on the Shoah, this book brings back to life the atrocities of the past. It makes the suffering live again, but making us stronger in the end. It is surely destined to be another hit among Shoah books.

Rating:
Summary: Shocking and touching !
Review: Having had a chance to read some of the book before it is out to the general public, one can already convey the feelings of shock that it conveys. As do many books on the Shoah, this book brings back to life the atrocities of the past. It makes the suffering live again, but making us stronger in the end. It is surely destined to be another hit among Shoah books.

Rating:
Summary: Memorial Day
Review: I read this book by chance, yesterday, Memorial Day 2003.
Been crying.
It's like Schindler's List or Sophie's choice.
How could they do it?
How can we let them continue doing it?
The animals still are around us, although using another names, another symbols, another motivations.
I kept reading, hoping to find some of the people to be safe at the end, but almost everybody was killed.
Binim, Rozak, Mayer, Bronka, so many of you.
I miss you, my friends.

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Summary: A Face Is More Than a Name: The People of Bendin
Review: The whole world knows the face of Anne Frank whose life and writings have been the subject of numerous books, plays and films. But what about those nameless, faceless other millions whose voices were silenced by Nazi barbarity in a government-sponsored policy of mass murder? Ann Weiss, a soccer-mom from suburban Philadelphia and the daughter of survivors from Poland, on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1987 found, quite by chance, an album filled with hundreds of photos of families and individuals living normal lives until three days in August, 1943, when the entire Jewish community of Bendin, Poland, was transported to Auschwitz and murdered. Photos of this kind are rarer than gold, for in the words of one survivor, "They (the Nazis) didn't want to destroy us only but also all of our words, our lives, our memories. For this alone I can never forgive them." While many books about the Holocaust focus on broken remnants of the victims' physical existence, Weiss's extraordinary album restores to them their smiles, laughter and songs. With painstaking research and dedication over a period of fourteen years, Weiss learned their names and family histories. The result is nothing less than a miracle: a restoration to the world of the living, in spirit at least, of these beautiful people of Bendin whose dreams were shattered by events that seem incomprehensible to us today. In one especially touching photo, Artur Huppert holds his twenty-month-old son, Peterle, on his shoulder for the boy's grandparents with the inscription, "Healthy and strong to the age of 120. Radiant as the moon." The rest would be silence if it were not for Weiss's project of remembrance.

Rating:
Summary: A Face Is More Than a Name: The People of Bendin
Review: The whole world knows the face of Anne Frank whose life and writings have been the subject of numerous books, plays and films. But what about those nameless, faceless other millions whose voices were silenced by Nazi barbarity in a government-sponsored policy of mass murder? Ann Weiss, a soccer-mom from suburban Philadelphia and the daughter of survivors from Poland, on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1987 found, quite by chance, an album filled with hundreds of photos of families and individuals living normal lives until three days in August, 1943, when the entire Jewish community of Bendin, Poland, was transported to Auschwitz and murdered. Photos of this kind are rarer than gold, for in the words of one survivor, "They (the Nazis) didn't want to destroy us only but also all of our words, our lives, our memories. For this alone I can never forgive them." While many books about the Holocaust focus on broken remnants of the victims' physical existence, Weiss's extraordinary album restores to them their smiles, laughter and songs. With painstaking research and dedication over a period of fourteen years, Weiss learned their names and family histories. The result is nothing less than a miracle: a restoration to the world of the living, in spirit at least, of these beautiful people of Bendin whose dreams were shattered by events that seem incomprehensible to us today. In one especially touching photo, Artur Huppert holds his twenty-month-old son, Peterle, on his shoulder for the boy's grandparents with the inscription, "Healthy and strong to the age of 120. Radiant as the moon." The rest would be silence if it were not for Weiss's project of remembrance.