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International Centre for Litvak Photography Collection (IC4LP)

International Centre for Litvak Photography Collection (IC4LP)

  • Collection
  • 2022

The IC4LP Collection features two series of family photographs that were discovered hidden away in different attics in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in 1996 and 2016.

Assembled by two Jewish families in the decades leading up to the German invasion of Lithuania at the start of Operation Barbarossa, and featuring a variety of studio portraits, snapshots and other vernacular images from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Lithuania, Mozambique, Poland, Romania South Africa, Switzerland and the United States, both series of photographs miraculously escaped the fate of the approximately five million other Lithuanian Jewish family photographs that were either burned or thrown away during the mass cultural destruction that accompanied the murder of almost 200,000 Lithuanian Jews between 1941 and 1944.

Both series of photographs in the IC4LP collection came into the possession of the International Centre for Litvak Photography (IC4LP) under different circumstances at a time when the identities of their original, prewar owners was still unknown. Using a combination of social media crowdsourcing and various other conventional and less orthodox research techniques, IC4LP not only managed to discover who many of the people in the images were, in the case of one series it was also possible to reunite the photographs with surviving relatives living in the United States. In the case of the other series, The Kassels, which includes a number of photographs that were taken in South Africa and Mozambique during early part of the 20th century, the search for surviving relatives continues. If you believe that you might be related to the Kassels, or if you know someone who might be, please get in touch.

Lost and Found Photograph Series

The Lost & Found series features 110 family photographs that were owned and assembled between around 1910 and 1940 by Annushka Varšavskienė (1895-1944), a well-known singer in interwar Lithuania who was deported from the Kovno Ghetto to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia on October 26, 1943. Shortly before she was sent to her ultimate death, Annushka smuggled the photographs out of the ghetto and into the safety of a non-Jewish family, in whose house they remained for almost 70 years before being accidentally discovered by the Richard Schofield, the director at the International Centre for Litvak Photography. The subject of a subsequent crowdsourcing campaign to identify the family, whose identity had lost been during the previous seven decades, in 2016 not only was Annushka’s identity rediscovered, it was also possible to reunite the photographs with surviving members of Annushka’s family in the United States, among them the renowned Jewish scholars and the children of Annushka’s half-sister, Ruth Wisse and David G. Roskies.

The Kassels Photograph Series

Non-Jewish Nijolė Kučinskaitė was born on August 2, 1943 in a house in Kaunas that had previously been inhabited by an unknown family that had been forced into the Kovno Ghetto in August 1941. Whilst clearing out her attic in her early 70s, Nijolė discovered 42 original black and white photographs, of which several included samples of writing in Yiddish and Hebrew. Nijolė passed away in 2020, and her niece, Sigita Židonienė, donated them to the International Centre for Litvak Photography (IC4LP) the following year. With the help of a small group of volunteers in Israel, Lithuania and Switzerland, IC4LP was able to discover the identity of the family that originally owned the photographs and that clearly didn’t survive the Holocaust. The photographs that date from about 1912 until the start of the Second World War once belonged to the Kassels, who many of the photographs suggest travelled to and/or had relatives in Czechoslovakia, Mozambique, Switzerland, South Africa and the United States. Research into the Kassels is ongoing, and IC4LP is still in the process of trying to find surviving relatives somewhere.