Series - 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.