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| Annushka Varšavskienė Date and location unknown |
Lost & Found is a long-term project whose primary focus is a collection of over 100 family photographs that were owned and assembled in the years leading up to the Second World War by Annushka Varšavskienė, a classically trained singer, music teacher and childcare worker who was deported from the Kovno Ghetto in October 1943 and subsequently murdered at the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia 11 months later.
In an unprecedented act of preservation among the thousands of accounts of survival during the Holocaust, shortly before she was deported, Annushka smuggled 113 of her family photographs out of the ghetto and into the safekeeping of a local Lithuanian woman, whose family kept them safe for almost 70 years, during which time Annushka's identity was lost and forgotten.
The International Centre for Litvak Photography's founder and former director, Richard Schofield, stumbled upon the photographs by accident in September 2013, an event that, with the help of a digital crowdsourcing campaign on social media and the inspired sleuthing of the Vilnius-based historian Saulė Valiūnaitė, not only revealed Annushka’s lost identity, but also made it possible to 'return' the photographs to the children of her surviving sister living in the United States, among them the international acclaimed Jewish scholar, and Annushka's nephew, David G. Roskies.
The following links provide some background information relating to the Lost & Found exhibition, that ran at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York between October 2018 and April 2019. A short article providing an overview of the project can be found here.
- Click here to read an article in Moment magazine about the Lost & Found exhibition that ran at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York between October 2018 and April 2019
- Click here watch two of the three short films that the International Centre for Litvak Photography made for the exhibition
- Click here to view the photographs from the exhibition opening
- Click here to view the photographs (with captions) that Richard discovered
- Click here to listen to four recordings from the 1930s of Annushka and her choir