Shoah Survivor

This is a posting from an older assignment that I felt was worth sharing:
Irene Weiss, a Hungarian Auschwitz survivor, sitting in front of a photo-mural in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It depicts a mass of Hungarian Jewish prisoners disembarking from a transport train in Birkenau, Poland in May, 1944. A German officer took the photo, which was found after the war. Ms. Weiss, who was 12 at the time, is pictured on the mural at center left- she is the young girl in the headscarf. Some unusual circumstances caused her and her sister to survive the cruel selections made by the Nazi camp adminstrators, but her parents and other family members were chosen for death, and were killed that very day in the gas chambers.

Ms. Weiss lives in Fairfax VA.

I had a chance meeting with her daughter recently, and it brought this portrait to mind. It was made on assignment in summer 1994 for Washington Jewish Week.