In 1942, two young anthropologists from Vienna photographed and examined 106 Jewish families from the small city of Tarnów in German-occupied Poland. They were trying to research “typical characteristics of eastern European Jews.” The two scholars were fully aware that their subjects would soon be sent to concentration camps and worked correspondingly quickly. All told, they examined and photographed 565 men, women and children, almost all of whom were murdered a few months later in the Holocaust. Only 25 would survive to tell of what they had been through. Their recollections together with the images and biographic data from those murdered allow us to reconstruct the lives, persecution and destruction of the 25,000 Jews of Tarnów. The names professions and photos that have survived from an in part randomly selected group stand for the fate of an entire Jewish community.
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