When Richard Schofield stumbled upon a trove of unidentified pre-World War II photographs in the storage room of a museum in Lithuania, the professional photographer knew he had found something special.
Dating from about 1910 through 1940, the photos were from a Lithuanian Jewish family’s album that had been smuggled out of the wartime Jewish ghetto in Kovno and entrusted to a non-Jewish Lithuanian family for safekeeping. But nobody knew what had happened to the people in the pictures; presumably they had not survived the war.
Intrigued to learn what had happened to the photos’ subjects, Schofield set about trying to identify them. He scanned the 112 photos and set up a Facebook page to showcase them.
“People started helping us with the translations of the writings on the photographs, and some things started to become clear,” said Schofield, who found the photos in September 2013. “We worked out that the woman in many of the photographs was called Anna, or Anushka.”
Then, in late March, in a twist of serendipity, an archivist who worked at the Jewish museum in the Lithuanian capital city of Vilnius noticed something: After clicking through the photographs and doing a bit of sleuthing, Saule Valiunaite realized that one of the photos appeared in a 1999 documentary film about the Holocaust.
It turns out that the subjects in the photos were relatives of two of America’s best-known Yiddish scholars: Ruth Wisse of Harvard and her brother, David Roskies of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. A third sibling, Eva Roskies Raby, is a former director of the Montreal Jewish Public Library.
The album Schofield had found in the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas (formerly Kovno) had belonged to Anushka Warshawski, the siblings’ aunt, who perished in the Holocaust along with many other family members. All of the pieces fell into place just weeks ago.
“Many of these pictures are not only familiar to us but are the same ones as those in our mother’s album that she brought over in 1940,” said Wisse, who appears in one of the photos. “We grew up with these photographs.”
Of Anushka’s 10 siblings, only two survived the war. One had immigrated to America decades before the Holocaust. The other was Wisse and Roskies’ mother, Masha, who fled Czernowitz (then part of Romania) for Montreal in 1940. For her children, the album’s discovery offered some tantalizing new details about family members they had been hearing about their whole lives.
“When I saw these pictures, it felt like a huge piece of the puzzle had fallen into place,” said Roskies, who wrote a memoir about his family, “Yiddishlands,” in 2008.
“It was a huge family, and they all died,” Roskies said. “My mother dedicated the rest of her life to keeping the memory of that family alive. She told stories about them three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. My mother believed that history ended in 1940, that everything important ended the moment she left Europe.
“These stories were like her Bible, they were the reference point for her whole subsequent life. We were constantly reminded of these people we never met and would never meet. They became our surrogate family.”
The newly discovered album confirms the special bond between his mother and Anushka, Roskies said. The two sisters corresponded and sent photos back and forth during the years after they married and lived apart — Anushka in Kovno and Masha in Vilna and then Czernowitz. They reunited only once during those years, in Czernowitz in 1938. After that, they never saw each other again.
“Just as my mother was religiously saving these pictures of Anushka and her other sisters and their children, Anushka was doing the exact same thing in Kovno,” said Roskies, 68, the chair in Yiddish literature and culture at JTS.
In one picture, a young Ruth Wisse, probably age 4, is bundled up against the snow and venturing forth on ice skates. Recently retired from Harvard as a professor of Yiddish literature and comparative literature, Wisse now lives in New York.
Some photographs feature Anushka with her second husband at a lumberyard, suggesting that may have been the source of his considerable wealth, according to Roskies. There are also photos of Anushka’s first husband, with whom she had a child who later disappeared into the Soviet gulag, and shots of Anushka at an orphanage where she may have worked.
Schofield, a documentary photographer, is raising money for a piece of music he’s calling the “Kaunas Requiem” that he hopes to stage at an installation in September to mark the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Kaunas/Kovno ghetto. He’s not yet sure how he’ll incorporate the new information about the photographs.
“When I found the photographs, I thought it would be nice to put names to faces. I never really thought about what I would do if that happened,” said Schofield, a non-Jewish native of Britain who has been living in Lithuania for 15 years. “It’s all pretty incredible, really. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster.”
Valiunaite, who works as a historian at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, gets much of the credit for putting the pieces together. She said she figured out the connection by finding a match between a sanitorium resort that appeared in the photographs and Lithuanian records showing the resort was owned by the Warshawski family.
She later discovered that Anushka had something of a musical career — a detail mentioned in Roskies’ book and in a 45-minute documentary film from 1999 called “Daughter of Vilna: The Life in Song of Masha Roskies.” The final proof was a photo in the film that matched one found in the trove.
The fact that Anushka went to the trouble of smuggling the album out of the Kovno ghetto speaks volumes, Roskies said. By the time of the ghetto’s liquidation in 1943, it must have been clear to the Jews who remained that they, too, soon would be headed to their deaths, Roskies surmises.
“Why would Anushka care about a photo album if she was going to die?” he asked. “She knew Masha had escaped to Canada and survived. What must have been going through Anushka’s head was: ‘We reached the end of the line. The ghettos are being depleted. I want Masha to have this album, so I have to find a way of getting it to her.’ ”