None Shall Be Nameless and Faceless

"I couldn't shake the feeling that I had potentially walked past a photo of a family member without even knowing it."

"I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors, all from Poland."

Danial Patt, Google employee, creator of website N2N (From Numbers to Names)

An engineer has created software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify anonymous Holocaust victims in World War II photos.  Photo EPA

"She believed [Geddy Lee's grandmother] that if they [her family] were all going to perish, they would perish together, and if they were all going to survive, they would survive together."

Geddy Lee, Rush rocker

Privacy rights activists, academics specializing in ethics concerns and human rights and specialists involved in the technology industry have all expressed concerns over artificial intelligence and face recognition technology and with good reason. Beijing for example, gives ample reason for unease over its broad, universal use of face recognition to keep tabs on its citizens and to gain information on their political orientation and activities deemed to be injurious to state interests. 

But like any technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries there are positive applications and there is the potential for negative use of new knowledge. And while Beijing uses face recognition to keep its population in line with its state-ideological oversight, a new application for facial recognition has been pioneered by a Google software engineer, Danial Patt, who was inspired to create the website From Numbers to Names. Here, the facial recognition facility is powered by AI analyzing photographs of Holocaust survivors to match them with headshots provided by website users.

"We reached out to Geddy Lee, from Rush, with a photo we thought was of his mother. He was able to confirm this was indeed a photo of her at the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen."

"Geddy was then able to subsequently discover photos of his grandmother, uncles, an aunt and other extended family by browsing the Yad Vashem [Israel] collection where the initial photo came from."

Daniel Patt, creator of N2N

Geddy Lee's mother, Mary Weinrib, survived Auschwitz, as a Holocaust survivor, and arrived as a refugee with her husband Morris Weinrib to Canada in 1946. She spoke of her Auschwitz experiences with her children, according to Lee. When a photo was discovered showing Mary Weinrib at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northwestern Germany Danial Patt contacted Lee. 

 

Born in Warsaw in 1925, Manya (Malka) Rubinstein who later became Mary Weinrib at marriage, was sent with her family to a labour camp in Starachowice, then later relocated to Auschwitz, and finally Bergen-Belsen, somehow surviving her ordeal. On a visit to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Patt was inspired to work on a project in his spare time with his personal resources, that would eventually become the Numbers to Names website.

 

There is now a team of engineers and researchers working on the project with Patt who aspires to partner with museums, schools, research institutions and other groups to raise awareness of the Holocaust. The website can be freely accessed and has analyzed over 500,000 photographs with roughly two million faces. The hope is that eventually 700,000 additional photos dating before and during the Holocaust will be accessed.

 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) uses the technology now. Its immense collection of a database exceeding 270,000 registered survivors with over 85,000 historical photographs represents an asset allowing the museum to access another one million photographs. The one constraining issue to completely identifying the vast number of people who passed through the gates of Hell in the Final Solution, is ebbing time. 

Currently there is no single list identifying the victims and survivors of the Holocaust (Picture: EPA/www.auschwitz.org)

"[There is so much interest in the N2N website] there is a backlog of potential identifications we're manually going through now."

"We have been developing the project over the course of evenings and weekends over many months. There's an urgency to this effort as the last remaining survivors pass, and there are many connections that could still be made."

“We simply show results, with similarity scores, and let individuals decide whether the results contain a positive identification,”

"We hope that N2N can help build those connections while the survivors are still with us."

Danial Patt, creator of N2N

Patt says that his team makes no software-based assertions about the accuracy of the identification, leaving that judgment to the people using the site.  Peta Pixel