A discovery of Holocaust-era photos helps a Jewish family connect with its past

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/27/ [login to see] /a-discovery-of-holocaust-era-photos-helps-a-jewish-family-connect-with-its-past
The U.S. Holocaust Museum has acquired photos of a French internment camp where 18,000 Jews were imprisoned before being sent to Auschwitz. The story of how rare photographs were rediscovered begins three decades ago on the streets of New York's Greenwich Village.

In 1989, Silvia Espinosa-Schrock was an undergraduate art student at Cooper Union when she stopped to browse through knickknacks someone was selling on the street. "I saw that box," she recalls. "Instinctively, I was drawn to it, being kind of a visual artist. And I knew I had to save these pictures because I knew this was precious and I knew this should belong to a family."

Espinosa-Schrock paid $5 for the box. Looking through the collection of some 200 photos, she realized they came from a Jewish family, and included pictures of a concentration camp. She always wanted to find the family they belonged to, but couldn't figure out how, so she put them away.

She moved back home to Miami where she's now an artist and art history teacher. The photos remained in storage at her mother's house for the next 30 years. Espinosa-Schrock forgot about them until last year when she came across them in a burst of pandemic cleaning. "There it was, that old box, old cardboard box full of these incredible photographs," she says. "Immediately that night, I started to Google. I've got to find this family."