Holocaust stories

12 November 2022, 05:29 PM

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

12 November 2022, 11:21 PM

Amanda

quote:
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

Another good use of technology, including
AI.

I don't understand why nothing whatsoever was said about the adoptive parents of the adopted Holocaust survivor children.

What kind of people adopt children under such circumstances? I'm sure they rationalized it as being in the children's best interests.
Still I would have liked to know more, from the human angle, about what his childhood with them was like and how he feels towards them.

12 November 2022, 11:38 PM

Amanda

As for the general long-lasting (hundreds of years!) forced emigration of children to these incredibly abusive institutions and families.

It is so terribly sad. Sometimes it's hard to even attempt to believe in G-d.

I know this is long known (the abuse of Catholic priests in the US and the - if possible - even worse abuse of the children in Irish orphanages*). That is, those nun-run hell-holes of neglect and cruelty, if one can even call them *orphanages considering most of the children were born out of wedlock and forcibly incarcerated there regardless of their helpless mothers' wishes. (I guess they were considered somehow deserving mistreatment and neglect because they were "children of sin".)

My mind wanders to the myriad unmarked graveyards where these unwanted children were buried, found recently, most of them dying of cruelty and neglect, from birth on.

I find myself wondering at a profound level for the first time, WHAT in the world led these "sisters" and "brothers/fathers" to join holy orders.

I realize many came themselves from impoverished families for whom such a life was the only way they saw to survive. Still, what promoted the leap from a possibly opportunistic decision to a life of "child care" which turned to child abuse with their wards subjected by and large to incredible cruelty, neglect, and even (so much!) sexual abuse?

Were they predisposed to child molestation according to which they gravitated to such a profession (by rumor or their own early molestation?) or were they somehow twisted in that direction by the social environment?

Naive, I guess, but where did religion (least of all, Christianity) fit in? Reading of their childhood torture brought home to me most of all for the first time, how completely helpless and vulnerable children are (thinking in this context especially of the boys since I have the impression that most of the children born in the nun's establishments died before they grew old enough to be molested.)

And yet these same believers (I include Ireland where abortion was only recently allowed) virulently oppose not only abortion but birth control.