Auschwitz registration photos in Colour

Czesława Kwoka

Marina Amaral, Digital colourist, ' I add colour to Auschwitz registration photos to educate people about the Holocaust' Metro.co.uk   Sunday 27 Jan 2019

 Czeslawa, pictured above, was a 14-year-old girl who was killed in Auschwitz. She was a Polish Roman Catholic and was murdered one month after the death of her mother. [...] The photo went viral in a matter of minutes. The reaction was absolutely incredible and shocking. I was contacted by TV channels, newspapers and magazines from all over the world wanting to know more about the photo and about Czeslawa. More importantly though, I received messages from teachers asking if they could use the photo in their classes and a 12-year-old girl wrote a poem inspired by the photograph and sent it to me. That’s when I realised how much people still had to learn about the Holocaust and the potential of something so simple as a colourised photo in helping to educate. It’s important to share individuals’ stories and photos because it’s very easy to get lost in the sheer scale of the Holocaust. [...] Six million Jewish lives and more than 3million non-Jewish people’s lives were taken and that is a huge number, but when we break down this number and transform it into individual and different lives, pairing a picture of their face when we can, people can begin to understand the impact that the Holocaust had, and still has, on lives. They had everything taken away from them due to pure bigotry and hate. In the same week as the photo went viral I asked the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum permission to colourise more photographs. They gave me access to their archives, where almost 40,000 concentration camp registration photos are stored. The photographs were taken between February 1941 and January 1945. The preserved photos, 31,969 of men and 6,947 of women, constitute only a fraction of a vast Nazi archive destroyed during the camp evacuation in January 1945. [...] By the end of this year I would like to have colourised at least 200 of the photographs. Ultimately, I hope that our project and upcoming documentary reaches a broader audience and we can continue to share the stories and faces of those who so tragically had their lives taken away by hatred.

You can find out more about Faces of Auschwitz here, and Marina’s work here.