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'I never knew my mother escaped the Holocaust'

Michael Goodwin was brought up by adoptive parents in Australia believing he was of Irish Catholic descent. He grew up wanting to find out something about his mother. Now at the age of 80 he knows, at last, the truth about his real family.

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AI reunites Holocaust survivor with childhood photos

Blanche Fixler remembers hiding inside a bed while Nazis searched for her.

"I felt them tapping on the bed," she recalls. "I said, you better not breathe or sneeze or anything - or you'll be dead."

Blanche was a survivor - she was lucky. Six million Jews like her were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War Two. The names of more than one million of those people are unknown.

Now a tool using artificial intelligence (AI) - built by Daniel Patt, a software engineer for Google - could hold the key to putting names to some of the many faces, both victims and survivors, in hundreds of thousands of historic photographs. It found Blanche in a wartime photo which she had never seen before.

Daniel's website, Numbers to Names, uses facial recognition technology to analyse a person's face. It then searches through archive photos to find potential matches.

The software has been cross-referencing millions of faces, to try to find matches for people who have already been identified in one photo - but not in others.

That detective work - joining the dots - could then help identify some people in photos whose identities are currently unknown.

Blanche, who is now 86 and lives in New York, knew about the family snapshot below on the right - but she had never previously seen the group photo on the left, which was taken in France during the war.

It was Daniel's AI software which made the connection.

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Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

AI reunites Holocaust survivor with childhood photos

Blanche Fixler remembers hiding inside a bed while Nazis searched for her.

"I felt them tapping on the bed," she recalls. "I said, you better not breathe or sneeze or anything - or you'll be dead."

Blanche was a survivor - she was lucky. Six million Jews like her were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War Two. The names of more than one million of those people are unknown.

Now a tool using artificial intelligence (AI) - built by Daniel Patt, a software engineer for Google - could hold the key to putting names to some of the many faces, both victims and survivors, in hundreds of thousands of historic photographs. It found Blanche in a wartime photo which she had never seen before.

Daniel's website, Numbers to Names, uses facial recognition technology to analyse a person's face. It then searches through archive photos to find potential matches.

The software has been cross-referencing millions of faces, to try to find matches for people who have already been identified in one photo - but not in others.

That detective work - joining the dots - could then help identify some people in photos whose identities are currently unknown.

Blanche, who is now 86 and lives in New York, knew about the family snapshot below on the right - but she had never previously seen the group photo on the left, which was taken in France during the war.

It was Daniel's AI software which made the connection.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63483694