Series description
The last of the Holocaust survivors are dying, so it is down to this generation to remember their stories. These are stories filled with hardship and hope, loss and remembrance; stories hidden in documents, photographs and objects scattered like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; stories rarely told, that bring a tear to your eye when the words finally spill out.
My family is one of these stories. Both sides of my family are Jewish and they emigrated from Europe during the Holocaust. They leave behind memories of their lives in photographs, diaries, memoirs, official documents, letters and oral tales. By piecing together these materials, this project explores these stories and forms the memory of our history, a narrative shared by hundreds of thousands of families who survived persecution during the Holocaust.
Biography
As a visual storyteller, Emily Steinberger focuses on remembrance and memory woven into themes of family, religion, environment, nostalgia, and tradition. Her work explores the boundary between documentary photography and artistic expression, and her goal is to bring the viewer into a world that expands beyond what they see in the photograph. She hopes how she tells stories allows viewers to smell the scents, hear the sounds, touch the textures, feel the emotions — even if only in their imagination.
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My great-grandmother and my grandmother in New York after fleeing Poland during the Holocaust. Their faces are covered with flowers, because although this is a story about my family, it is a story that many other families of Holocaust survivors can empathise with. With their faces covered, this pair could be any mother-daughter duo. I am lucky that it is mine.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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Piecing together my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s history. The photograph is of my great-grandfather with an unknown woman, still in Poland before the Holocaust drove him and my great-grandmother to flee. Highlighted in yellow on the map is the town where my grandfather’s family was born, also in Poland. My grandparents met in New York and have since relocated to Massachusetts, where I picked this Goldenrod.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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My paternal grandmother, Erika, after winning a Jewish community beauty pageant in Quito, Ecuador. Erika and her brother left Nazi Germany for England on the Kindertransport, and their parents fled to Quito. She kept a diary during that time, so although I never met her I can see into her life. My dad tells me stories, too, and he regularly mentions that I have her chin.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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A framed photograph of me with my maternal great-grandmother in the early 2000s, on top of my bedsheets. My great-grandmother, Florence, fled Poland with her husband and her newborn baby, leaving the place where she was born. My great-grandmother told me these stories, but now I wish I had taken more photographs of her and listened to her stories with the mind I have now.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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My maternal great-grandfather with his mother, on top of a photograph of the temple in Czortkow, Poland. Lavenders flanking the side of the temple represent the calmness of the pre-war years, before the city was wrecked and the Jews were killed. Although my great-grandfather's entire family was killed during the Holocaust in concentration camps, he kept photographs and records of his family, including this one of him with his mother.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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My maternal great-grandfather’s student certificate from Poland, where he was a doctor. I can’t help but think that, as a Jew who was persecuted even before the Holocaust began, he had a desire to save lives; lives like those of his relatives who did not survive. A splattering of flower petals surround his identification like drops of blood from the lives Phil saved and the family members he couldn’t.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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A photograph of my maternal great-grandfather, on a photograph of the main street in his hometown of Czortkow, Poland. He holds a flower, a metaphorical representation of his love for my great-grandmother, which helped give them hope for the future. When the Nazis took over, the town was destroyed; after Liberation Day, my great-grandmother walked through the city she had been hiding in, only to see it in ruins.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
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‘May you always remember that you are a link in the chain of our heritage, strengthening the future of our faith and sharing the holiday traditions with those you love.’ This note was written by my maternal great-grandmother, Florence (pictured with her daughter in America), to one of her relatives. She survived for us, for her daughter, for her daughter’s daughters and for her daughter’s daughters’ children.
© Emily Steinberger, United States, Shortlist, Professional competition, Creative, 2023 Sony World Photography Awards