The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes
Archival Photos From Auschwitz-Birkenau

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While on a group tour of Auschwitz as part of a diplomatic mission to Poland in 1986, Ann Weiss was accidentally let into an archive of thousands of family photos brought to the camp by the Nazis’ victims. Untouched and unseen since the liberation of the death camp in 1945, these poignant images immediately overwhelmed her. "I could not speak. I could barely breathe," she writes. "The familiar refrain ‘six million’ translated into six million times the individual, six million times Naftali and Raizele and Tzipohorah and Emanuel. Six million pairs of eyes."

Ann Weiss is an author, researcher, and educator, and the daughter of two Holocaust survivors from Poland. With the discovery of these photos she dedicated herself to preserving them and uncovering their stories. Weiss immediately began a 15-year struggle to first gain permission from the government to copy the photos, and then to find the relatives of the people in the pictures. Eyes from the Ashes, a documentary film based on her research into the photos, premiered in 1989. In 2001, Weiss completed the book, The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, published by W.W. Norton. She also created this powerful exhibition, which offers us a fresh perspective on the victims of history’s greatest crime.

Weiss began her education with an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Rochester. She then went on to study Visual and Political Communications at the graduate level at the Annenberg School for Communications and earned a second graduate degree in Information Science from Drexel University.

She is the founder and director of the Eyes from the Ashes Educational Foundation and has served on the Second Generation Advisory Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. since its inception. She is currently working on a postgraduate degree in Education, Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

Funding for the exhibition was provided in part by the Jewish Community Council of Erie. Additional funding was provided by the Ferkauf Family Foundation.

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