She moved to the United States after the battle, and assumed all of her household mementos have been lengthy gone, particularly since her household’s condo in Krakow was ransacked by the Nazis through the German occupation.
Fixler, now 86 and residing in New York, at all times wished she had photos from her earliest years of life.
Then in August, she acquired a telephone name that shocked her: Someone had discovered two group photos that confirmed her as a little bit lady in France. One of the photos, taken simply after the battle ended, included her aunt and two cousins.
“It meant more than you could imagine,” stated Fixler, who as a toddler was named Bronia Bruenner.
The name got here from Daniel Patt, a software program engineer for Google and the founder of a website referred to as From Numbers to Names, which makes use of artificial intelligence to discover previous images of family members and family misplaced through the Holocaust.
“It was incredible that he took it upon himself to do this kind thing,” she stated, including that he hand-delivered the photos to her in New York in October.
Patt’s website has hyperlinks to archives that comprise about 500,000 photos from museums akin to Yad Vashem — the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Anyone can add a photograph of a Holocaust sufferer or survivor to the location, and it’ll examine the picture to its archives.
“A search might lead to never-before-seen photos of a loved one,” stated Patt, 40, who lives within the San Francisco Bay space. “It’s a way to bring that person back to them and feel that they’re still with them in some way.”
Once a photograph is uploaded, facial recognition expertise finds the ten finest potential matches amongst photos from the archives.
“Everyone can do a quick scan of 34,000 photos in the archives in about five seconds,” stated Patt, noting that particular request searches are additionally executed as soon as a day to examine faces to all 500,000 photos.
“It’s too cost-prohibitive right now for everyone to search all 500,000 images every time they come to the website,” he stated.
Patt did a seek for photos of Fixler after he noticed a museum publish on Twitter from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about her that included an previous picture of her together with her aunt.
“I decided to run the photo through the site and found two World War II-era photos for Blanche,” he stated.
He then tracked down her telephone quantity and referred to as her to inform her what he discovered. When he confirmed her the photographs, she confirmed they have been certainly her and her household.
”It was a particular and unforgettable day,” Patt stated. “Blanche sang a little song she remembered from the orphanage after she saw the photos.”
Patt stated he was inspired to start From Numbers to Names after a 2016 go to to the POLIN Jewish history museum in Poland, the place his ancestors are from.
“Three of my grandparents are Holocaust survivors,” he stated. “And to the best of our knowledge, my great-grandfather was locked in a synagogue and burned alive by the Nazis.”
As he checked out museum partitions coated with photos of Jewish households whose lives have been torn aside by the Nazi regime, Patt stated he saved questioning in regards to the faces within the frames.
“I thought, ‘Am I looking at photos of some of my family members without even realizing it?’” he stated. “It occurred to me that with the technology we have today, we might be able to find matches to photos from museums around the world.”
Patt launched From Numbers to Names in April 2021 and commenced downloading photos from Holocaust museum collections when he got here throughout them on-line.
“It’s simple to use and it’s free,” he stated, noting that he plans to add extra archives to the location as they’re made out there.
Fixler stated it was solely as a result of of her aunt, Rosa Berger, that she survived the Holocaust.
She was despatched to stay together with her aunt when she was 4 after deportations to concentration camps began within the Krakow ghetto. Fixler’s household took refuge in an underground bunker.
“My mother was afraid I would cry and give everyone away, so she had a good Samaritan take me to my aunt, who was living under a false name,” she stated.
Fixler stated she lived together with her aunt on the outskirts of Krakow till the landlady of their condo advised German authorities that she suspected Rosa Berger was harboring a Jewish youngster.
“My aunt had beautiful blond hair and spoke good German, so they didn’t bother her,” she stated. “But people wondered about me all the time.”
Nazi troopers got here to search Berger’s condo a number of instances, however her Aunt Rosa at all times managed to conceal her, Fixler stated.
When she was 6, she stated her aunt hid her beneath a down quilt and a big board contained in the mattress.
“She would make the bed up nice and straight, then put another bedspread on top and I would lie there under the board, quiet as a mouse,” Fixler recalled. “I told myself, ‘If you breathe or sneeze or cough, you are dead.’”
When her Aunt Rosa determined the state of affairs had develop into too harmful, Fixler was shuttled between orphanages in Poland, Hungary and France. Her aunt, who had given beginning through the battle, got here to stay together with her for some time at an orphanage exterior Paris, she stated.
One picture that turned up throughout Patt’s search reveals Fixler residing in a camp for displaced folks in Barbizon, France, after World War II ended. Her father was finally reunited together with her and the pair immigrated to the United States.
“I had an instinct to live and I was not bitter from the war,” Fixler stated, noting that her aunt finally joined them within the United States.
“My aunt was my savior — I was able to survive because of her and God,” she stated. “I’m very grateful to Daniel to have more photos from this period of my life.”
Patt stated it’s his honor to assist survivors — and their descendants — discover necessary hyperlinks to the previous.
“These are usually never-before-seen photos,” stated Patt. “Each one brings some feeling of closeness to their loved ones.”
Patt just lately helped actor Josh Gad discover an early picture of his grandmother Evelyn Greenblatt, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2008. He stumbled upon an Instagram publish Gad had written in 2018 about his grandparents and determined to search for further photos, utilizing the marriage picture Gad had posted.
Gad, identified for his roles in “Frozen,” “Beauty and the Beast” and the comedy collection “Avenue 5” on HBO Max, stated his mom had been performing some analysis and got here throughout one other picture, this one a blurry image of a lady she thought may be Greenblatt. Gad and his household puzzled if it was his grandmother as a young person.
“It was a photo my mom had found, but it was so distorted, we wouldn’t tell for sure whether it was her,” Gad stated.
Patt ran the Greenblatts’ marriage ceremony picture by means of his website and positioned a transparent model of the Evelyn Greenblatt picture Gad had puzzled about. He then did a second search and located one other picture that includes Gad’s great-grandmother, Sarah Rosenberg, who died in a focus camp.
“My family and I were in tears when Daniel told us about the photos,” stated Gad, 41. “To see these clear images was like traveling back in time. I was able to see my grandmother as a young woman, like the photo was taken yesterday.”
The picture of his grandmother carrying a Nazi-mandated Jewish badge on her coat additionally made his coronary heart sink, he stated.
“There was a realization that this photo of her was taken in the Jewish ghetto right before she was sent to the camps,” Gad stated. “Her life was about to change forever because she was going to endure such horrors.”
Gad stated he’s grateful day by day that his grandmother survived and was in a position to transfer ahead with a cheerful and fulfilling life.
“Because of the Holocaust, many of us have been robbed of the opportunity to see images of families that were in many cases wiped out,” he stated. “Thanks to Daniel and this new technology, we’re finally able to fill frames with photos that otherwise would not have been seen from this period of destruction and loss.”
Patt now spends most of his spare time on From Numbers to Names and receives assist from a few dozen volunteers. He stated he just lately acquired a grant for an academic pilot project that can permit college students to assist his group find extra photos for households.
“The plan is for them to help compare all of the nearly 500,000 archived photos online with each other,” he stated. “We want to take every single face in the archives and compare them to every other face in the collection in the hope of finding more names to go with the faces.”
He stated that the extra time he spends with the pictures, the extra impactful his mission turns into to him.
“I have a hard time coming up with words for what happened during the Holocaust,” Patt added. “It’s important to add faces to the numbers and share these photos with the world.”