Series - 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.