The Holocaust was World War II’s mass murder of Jews in Europe. Six million Jews, or roughly two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe, were murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies between 1941 and 1945 while living under German occupation.
Blanche Fixler is a survivor who remembers hiding inside a bed while Nazis searched for her.
“I felt them tapping on the bed.”
“I said, you better not breathe or sneeze or anything – or you’ll be dead”, she recalls.
Six million Jews like her were murdered by the Nazis with which the names of more than one million of those people are unknown.
Now, a technology utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), created by Daniel Patt, a software developer for Google, may hold the key to naming some of the numerous faces, both victims and survivors, in hundreds of thousands of old images. Blanche was discovered in a previously unseen wartime photograph.
Facial recognition technology is used on Daniel’s website, numbers to names, to analyze a person’s face. Then it looks for probable matches among old photos.
Millions of faces have been cross-referenced by the program in an effort to uncover matches for individuals who have already been recognized in one photo but not in others.
It may therefore be possible to identify some individuals in images whose identities are now unknown thanks to that detective work, or better yet, “connecting the dots.”
Blanche, who is now 86 and resides in New York, was aware of the family photograph below, on the right, but she had never seen the group photograph below, on the left, which was taken in France during the war.
Daniel’s AI program was the one to make the association.
When Blanche was younger, she went by the name Bronia. When the Nazis came seeking for her and her family, she was living in Poland.
Her aunt Rose, who concealed her, helped save her after her mother and siblings were killed.
To reconcile Blanche with the misplaced memory from the past, Daniel traveled to meet her.
It made her remember a French song she had learned as a young child that she had long since forgotten.
Blanche recognized right away standing at the front of the large group of people, but that was not all.
In addition, she recognized her aunt Rose and one of the boys in the picture, providing Daniel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with fresh data.
According to Scott Miller, the museum’s head of curatorial affairs, “It’s so important to identify these photos”.
“You’re restoring some semblance of dignity to them, some comfort to their family, and it’s a form of memorial for the entire Jewish community.”
“That’s part of the problem. I can’t stress enough how important these photos are of individuals.
“We all know the figure – six million Jews were killed – but it’s really one person six million times. Every person has a name, every person has a face.”
Only three of the people in the picture had been identified before Blanche saw it.
That number has doubled due to Blanche and Daniel’s software.
-Artificial Intelligence
Author- Roberta Appiah
