Her name was Barbara. She wore a smocked dress and bows in her braids when she sat for the photograph in Amsterdam weeks before her fifth birthday in the summer of 1943.
She would be dead the following fall, murdered at Auschwitz along with her mother, Julia. Yet they would quietly live on.
Seventy-five years later, their photos, along with those of two dozen others, make up Lost Stories, Found Images: Portraits of Jews in Wartime Amsterdam by Annemie Wolff opening at 5 p.m. Thursday, April 5 at Ridderhof Martin Gallery.
The exhibition, which runs through June 25, is part of a still-unraveling mystery that began in 1943 when more than 400 people – many of them Jewish and wearing the mandatory yellow star of David – sat for photos for Wolff in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
No one may ever know why they came to Wolff, or why Wolff agreed to photograph them. The act alone could have been construed as criminal. The subjects may have wanted nothing more than a keepsake for family and friends. Or they might have needed the images for false identification papers.
Wolff never spoke of her wartime activities, nor of the hundreds of images she took during 10 months in 1943. She died in 2008, more than a decade before a Dutch photo historian named Simon B. Kool unearthed the rolls of film in the attic of Wolff’s heir, Monica Kaltenschnee.
The photographer’s own life had been tragically upended by the Nazis. She’d fled Germany with her Jewish husband, Helmuth, when Hitler rose to power in 1933. The couple settled in Amsterdam, opened a photo studio and founded a photography magazine. Then in 1940, the once-unimaginable happened: the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. The couple made a suicide pact.
Only Annemie would survive to continue their work – to take the long-forgotten portraits that will come to UMW Galleries this week. Kool’s 2008 discovery was only the beginning. Historians and researchers An Huitzing and Tamara Becker have since identified many of those photographed.
“I saw the yellow stars and I wanted to know what had happened to those people,” Kool told the Times of Israel in 2015.
About half went on to survive the war – shockingly good odds in a country where more than three-quarters of the Jewish population perished.
“For those who lived, this photo is a moment in time. For the others, it’s their last trace on earth,” Jacqueline Shelton, whose father’s photograph was among those found on the film, told The Times of Israel.
His was a story of survival. Four months after he sat for a series of photographs, arms crossed, cigarette in mouth, he escaped to France with a group of other young Jewish men.
“He sold everything, procured false ID papers and went underground,” Shelton told UMW. His life depended on it.
He came to the U.S. in 1947, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. He changed his name to George Shelton, married and made a life. He died in 2002. It was George’s daughter, Jacqueline Shelton, who would be instrumental in bringing 26 of Wolff’s portraits, including his, to the U.S.
Thursday marks the first time Lost Stories, Found Images will be on display on the East Coast, said Rosemary Jesionowski, UMW photography professor and gallery specialist who has worked closely with Shelton to bring the exhibition here.
More than two years in the making, it is the work of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation and the Amsterdam-based Wolff Foundation, and a host of people and departments from UMW: Jesionowski, German Professor Marcel Rotter, Psychology Professor David Rettinger, Executive Director of Development Zach Hatcher, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Jewish Student Association.
A screening of Last Portraits, a documentary, will follow the opening reception at 7 p.m. in Pollard 304. Author Armin Langer will give an affiliated talk Monday, April 9 at 4 p.m. in Combs Hall, Room 139. Shelton plans to visit UMW in May.
“This isn’t exclusively an art exhibition. It’s also about history. It’s about religion. It’s about sociology and it’s about photography,” Jesionowski said.
It is a snapshot of an extraordinary moment in history.
“When you are in a room surrounded by these life-size portraits, it is if they are looking at you. It creates a relationship,” Shelton said. And that feeling lingers, long after the exhibit is over.
Like Annemie Wolff’s photographs and the stories they tell, it lives on.