International Holocaust Remembrance Day

A series of black and white portraits of Moise Felman, a 16 year-old boy who was killed at Treblinka

Today, January 27, marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, recognized worldwide as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Now on the site of the Warsaw ghetto proudly stands POLIN, a museum celebrating the history of Jewish life in Poland. Tonight POLIN offers a Memory Project workshop to honor and connect with Holocaust victims, survivors and rescuers by making their portraits and learning their stories. The woman who will lead the workshop is Anna Majewska. Anna is not Jewish, but her great-grandmother worked at Skarzysko-Kamienna, in the same ammunition factory as Anna Huberman Jacobs, the mother of Memory Project co-creator, Anna Jacobs. An unexpected connection, that was moving to all of us.

See the portraits that have been made so far, across Poland and the U.S., in Hungary, and Israel. Choose one person, perhaps Moishe Felman, and see how dozens have people have portrayed him. Read the story of his brief life. Then maybe look at the portraits and stories of Stefania Podgorska, a Polish rescuer who saved 13 Jewish people by hiding them in her attic.