'Faces of Auschwitz':
Learning History
in Color
Maria Zalewska
While some social media users employ Holocaust-related visual content in transgressive and often insensitive ways, others take advantage of social media affordances to participate in online communities of Holocaust memory and history educators. It is the latter group of social media users that Marina Amaral - a self-taught Brazilian colourist – belongs to.
In January 2017, Amaral chose an original photograph of a 14-year old Polish girl named Czesława Kwoka (camp no. 26947) to be the first installment of her colorized Auschwitz-Birkenau registration photos series. She carefully colorized the black-and-white triptych of Czesława’s Auschwitz registration portraits and shared it via Twitter to an overwhelmingly positive reception. However, it was not until March 2018, when the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum shared Marina’s work on its Twitter and Facebook accounts, that the colorized image of Czesława became viral on social media and the project 'Faces of Auschwitz' was officially born.
Emphasizing its educational and didactic mission, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum accompanied Amaral’s colorized image with a brief description of Czesława Kwoka’s life and information on the young girl’s haunting registration images. The Museum’s Twitter and Facebook followers learned that Czesława was one of the 230,000 children and youth deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz-Birkenau; that she arrived in Auschwitz on December 13, 1942 in a transport of 318 women; and that three months later, she was murdered with a phenol injection to the heart.
New media have created new spaces for people to communicate, build identity, and discuss issues across the globe. How digital communities interact with the past and memory through posts, images, and content on social media is becoming increasingly relevant to Holocaust and genocide scholars.
Czesława Kwoka