Connections Newsletter August 2023

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VOLUME 12 NO 4 Dear Child Survivors of the Holocaust, we trust you and yours are well and keeping warm. After the success of our seminar with Dr Paul Valent about memories and sharing personal stories with family and friends I felt the need to find out more about my Mother’s experience, a subject that was M th ’ Berlin, B li Holocaust H l never spoken about in our home including til the day my mother passed away. (15 years ago) I am only half way though finding out what happened, learning for the first time about family members names and the places they lived. Never knew the details of my grandparents’ families and my great grandparents. I have mixed emotions because it is exciting to connect with family for the first time and I am so sad understanding family members born in the late 1800s and their children, never survived the Holocaust. One small family, my

AUGUST 2023 mother and her younger sister and their parents arrived on the Romolo leaving by ship from Italy October 1938, arriving in Australia, December, 1938. Learning about my family has given me an even deeper understanding about how CSH reflect on their past and how important portant it is to be able to share what happened and how the memories are still so real. We trust this edition of Connections will give you plenty to reflect upon in the best possible way. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me viv.parry@bigpond.com or Lena lfiszman@bigpond.net.au. Warm regards, Viv Parry and Lena Fiszman Co-Presidents

From Lena’s Desk AI reunites Holocaust survivor with childhood photos Blanche Fixler remembers hiding inside a bed while Nazis searched for her. “I felt them tapping on the bed,” she recalls. “I said, you better not breathe or sneeze or anything - or you’ll be dead.” Blanche was a survivor - she was lucky. Six million Jews like her were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War Two. The names of more than one million of those people are unknown. Now a tool using artificial intelligence (AI) - built by Daniel Patt, a software engineer for Google - could hold the key to putting names to some of the many faces, both victims and survivors, in hundreds of thousands of historic photographs. It found Blanche in a wartime photo which she had never seen before. Daniel’s website, Numbers to Names, uses facial recognition technology to analyse a person’s face. It then searches through archive photos to find potential matches. The software has been cross-referencing millions of

Blanche Fixler and a picture of her as a child, circa 1945. Image source, US Holocaust Museum/BBC.

faces, to try to find matches for people who have already been identified in one photo - but not in others. That detective work - joining the dots - could then help identify some people in photos whose identities are currently unknown. Blanche, who is now 86 and lives in New York, knew about the family snapshot below on the right - but she had never previously seen the group photo on the left,


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