From the Miami press...
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
acquires photos that were stored in Miami home
By SERGIO CARMONA
JEWISH JOURNAL |
JAN 21, 2022 AT 2:56 PM
For more than 30 years, a
collection of Holocaust photos were stored in a Miami home.
The United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. has acquired the collection, which includes
more than 100 photos and documents. The collection includes rare photos of
imprisoned Jews in a French internment camp.
During a cleaning spree of her
childhood bedroom at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Miami
resident Silvia Espinosa-Schrock came across a box that she had not thought
about for three decades. As a 19-year-old art student in New York City,
Espinosa-Schrock purchased a cardboard box of black-and-white photos on a
sidewalk for $5 in January 1990. She used the box of photos in an art
installation assignment as a Cooper Union student.
“When I took the photos to my
studio, it dawned on me they were taken around World War II with the way the
people were dressed, and I came to realize they were a Jewish family,”
Espinosa-Schrock said.
Espinosa-Schrock was determined
to find the family, but when she graduated in the early 1990s, she packed up
the photos in storage boxes that were sent to her parents’ home in Miami. She
had not seen the photos in approximately 30 years until the 2020 cleaning
spree, having forgotten she stored them in storage boxes in the closet.
“Now that there’s internet, I
wanted to see if there was someone out there who is related to the family in
the photos,” she said.
When Espinosa-Schrock looked
closely at the box’s contents, she found the name “Joachim
Getter” written on one of the photographs. She conducted an online research of
the name and found one of Joachim Getter’s pictures posted on the “The Jewish
Przemyśl Blog,” created by David Semmel, a descendant of the family.
In April 2020, Espinosa-Schrock
reached out to Semmel, who resides in Bloomington, Ind., and wrote: “I think I
have something that belongs to your family.”
Semmel, who spends the winter
month in Fort Lauderdale, had family members from Przemyśl, a town in Poland,
who were killed in the Holocaust. When he when he received the photos from
Espinosa-Schrock, he was overwhelmed to see pictures of his mother as a
teenager, and also of his aunt Chaya and uncle Joachim, whom they called Muni.
He donated them to the museum.
“After piecing together the
family trees of the people in the photos using the JRI-Poland database, I realized how valuable this trove
would be for Holocaust historians, and I contacted the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum,” he said. “I didn’t want the collection to sit in my attic, and I hope
someone someday might recognize the other people from the photos when they’re
on the museum’s collection
website. Who knows? Another big discovery could happen.”
Espinosa-Schrock said, “I’m
very delighted that I contacted David Semmel.”
“If he had not had that blog,
these photos would still be in a box, in my room, and I would not know what to
do with them,” she said.
Semmel said he is grateful to
Espinosa-Schrock on several levels.
“Many in my direct family were
not in the Holocaust, as most of my relatives came over to the United States
well before the war, but there were some exceptions,” he said. “My
grandfather’s sister and his brother were both lost in the Holocaust, and
because of that, he knew very little about them. They were always people who
were talked about in a sad way as people who didn’t get to live full lives. In the
case of my aunt Chaya, we only had a single photograph of her when she was 12
years old. That’s all we knew of her. All of a sudden, I open this box, and I
can see her whole life. I can see her back in the old country in Przemyśl.”
Suzy Snyder, a museum curator,
assessed the collection and provided Semmel with documents to help him better
understand the historical context of the collection. According to Snyder, the
collection contains never-before-seen photographs of Beaune-la-Rolande, an
internment camp in central France located 55 miles south of Paris, which the
museum had limited visuals of. She also mentioned that the images belonged to
someone named Salomon Abend,
“These photographs were sent
from Salomon Abend to his then wife Paulette [born Perla Rosiner], two Jewish
people who were both persecuted during the Holocaust,” Snyder said. “They are
extremely rare because, somehow, these photographs were produced in a place
that had extreme deprivation. Also unusual is how the photographs survived once
they were sent to Paulette, who, herself, was likely in hiding during the
Holocaust. We have no idea how these rare images survived, which, if Paulette
had been discovered to possess, would have easily given her away as a Jew.”
Snyder said, “David donated the
collection to us, and will we catalogue it, digitalize it and put it online in
the next couple of years so that other people can use it as research tool.”
“We keyword
everything so that the approbate collection is easy to find,” she said.
Robert Tanen, director for the
museum’s Southeast Regional Office based in Boca Raton, said, “It’s a great
feeling to know that we uncovered yet another piece of history that would’ve
potentially been lost.”
Visit ushmm.org for more
information.
The Jewish Przemysl Forum
