About The Lost Stories Initiative

I’m Madeline and I’m a rising Senior at the Urban School of San Francisco. My grandfather was a holocaust survivor who fled Poland as a 15-year-old boy and managed to outrun the Nazis until the war ended in 1945. He died several years ago before I had the chance to ask him everything I wanted to know about his harrowing experience, which included escaping from a cargo train headed to Auschwitz and trading contraband goods to survive.  I’m concerned today that 60% of my generation doesn’t know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and that with anti-semitism on the rise, this history is in danger of being lost forever. 

Recently, I discovered a new AI-tool that was able to match photos of my grandfather against a database of 700,000+ photos from the Yad Vashem and US Holocaust Memorial Museum collections. From the search results, I saw his real Polish name in print for the first time: Stashek Weisbrot, learned that a photo of him is displayed at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC (and we had just been there to visit but didn’t see it!), and I found out that he was in a Displaced Persons camp in Eschwege, Germany. It is still a mystery how he was reunited with his brother there, and why the photo caption names him as the Chief of Police. 

I was so amazed by the results that I thought it would be really interesting to help other families of Holocaust survivors learn more about their family’s history. To get started, I decided to reach out to a Facebook Groups for Children of Survivor families to see if I could facilitate uploading photos and capturing firsthand history.  I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of interest and support!