Photoshop is interesting software for enhancing photos. Changing color images to black and white is fairly simple and the removal of color changes the mood instantly.

Bare tree limbs against a blue sky looks quite menacing when the image’s in black and white, and I usually fall back on the color image to see the vividness in the photo.

When I ran across an article featuring colorized photos of Holocaust victims, I reluctantly clicked on the link.

When we look at photos from the concentration camps, they’re beyond horrific. Emaciated people lying side by side in wooden bunks with barely any room to breathe.

Their bodies reflect starvation and brutalization, and their faces are hopeless.

That’s the reaction seeing the photos in black and white. But a new effort has artists colorizing the black-and-white images.

The results demands that viewers see the photos in a new light – real people with freckles, dimples and deep brown eyes.

The website “Faces of Auschwitz” has a collection of the colorized photos, and they will make you cry in sorrow for the beautiful, innocent people who met such a horrific death.

The number of those killed in the Nazi death camps is staggering – approximately 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz and nearly 1.1 million were Jews. Of those 1.3 million, 1.1 million – 85 percent – were gassed, beaten to death or starved to death.

One fact will haunt you – 232,000 children were sent to Auschwitz, separated from their parents and either executed, made to work or used for experiments.

On a single day, Oct. 10, 1944, 800 children were gassed to death at Auschwitz.

How did the people who carried out these atrocities go home to their families at night?

How did they eat dinner with their children, play in the park with their sons and enjoy a warm bed, knowing that a few miles away, children were starving to death in the frigid cold.

This week was the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to remember these atrocities so they don’t happen again.

What’s sad is most young people lack basic knowledge about what the Holocaust was and how many Jews and “enemies” of the German state were tortured and killed.

There’s an old saying by George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We think mass political killings could never happen in these days of 24-hour news and information on every subject under the sun at our fingertips, but atrocities happen every day, and we either don’t know or turn a blind eye.

When most people don’t have a clue about events like the Holocaust, we are in grave danger of repeating these same crimes against those whose religious or political beliefs are different from ours.

Many years ago, I arranged for a Holocaust survivor to speak at a church in Richmond. We opened the talk up to the community, and we all left in shock as we heard this gentle woman describe how she had to learn to lie to survive.

I think of her often, even more so as I looked at those colorized pictures of the Holocaust victims.

Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor said we see the world in color and the colorized photos bring these people and those events back to life for us. We must remember the evil people can commit if we want to stay off that path.

Ignorance and apathy are the first mile markers.

Hatred and envy ensure we stay on that road.

Learn your history.

Do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

And remember for those who are no longer here.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.