There are girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in short pants or wool jackets (one even wears a discarded Hitler Youth uniform). There are teens and toddlers. They look happy, sad, scared, tense and relieved.
These are children who’d come through the fire, survivors of the Holocaust photographed by social service agencies across Europe soon after World War II. There are more than 1,100 pictures, most of them long forgotten.
More than 65 years later, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reaching out around the world to find these people. It has posted their pictures online () and spread the word.
• Theodore Meicler, 73, recognized his 8-year-old self immediately: the thatch of dark brown hair, the unsmiling eyes, the distant look that concealed his sorrow.
“It brought me back to a time where I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know where I was going or who was going to feed me tomorrow,” he says.
Meicler was 4 when his father was arrested. For about two years, the young Theo hid in his native Belgium, shuttling from place to place. His mother and younger brother had taken refuge separately in other homes.
They reunited when the war ended. By then, his father had died in Auschwitz.
In the decades that followed, Meicler built a life, first in Israel, then in America. He married twice, had three children, bought an upholstery company and is now retired in Texas.
“There are not very many pictures where I look happy,” he says. “I haven’t been happy for most of my life.”
More than 1 million children died in the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of others were uprooted, temporarily or permanently. Some watched as their parents were taken away.
Since the photos appeared online, about 180 children have been identified from the U.S., Canada, France, Italy, Scotland, Belgium, Hungary, Switzerland, Israel, England and Australia. The website has attracted more than 61,500 visitors from 150 countries.
• Zoltan Farkas stood solemnly for his photo, his hands clutching a placard bearing his name, his heart hoping for a miracle.
Farkas, 83, sees his photo from when he was 18 as a milestone. “It was like being reborn. . . . I had the feeling, ‘Look, I’m alive!’ ” Farkas moved to America, served in the Army, earned an engineering degree and worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.
• Nathan Kranowski sees his frightened face but still finds it soothing.
Kranowski, now 73, was orphaned by age 4. His parents, Polish immigrants living in Paris, died in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
“Even though I know many people had stories like mine, when I see the picture, I find it comforting to know that, indeed, I wasn’t alone,” he says.
“The more I can picture my past and fill in the gaps, the more satisfied I am,” he says. “I want to understand what happened to me, to make sense of it.”
