Blanche Fixler remembers hiding inside a bed while Nazis searched for her. “I felt them tapping on the bed,” she recalls. “I said, you better not breathe or sneeze or anything – or you’ll be dead.”
Fixler survived what more than 6 million other Jews like her did not during World War II. Of the 6 million Jews that were murdered, more than one million of those people’s names are unknown.
When Fixler was six, the war was raging through Europe. Fixler said her aunt quickly placed her in an orphanage.
“My aunt had beautiful blond hair and spoke good German, so they didn’t bother her,” she said. “But people wondered about me all the time.” Numerous times, Nazi soldiers searched Berger’s flat, but she always managed to hide Fixler.
“She would make the bed up nice and straight, then put another bedspread on top and I would lie there under the board, quiet as a mouse. I told myself, ‘If you breathe or sneeze or cough, you are dead,'” Fixler recalled. She was moved throughout Poland, Hungary and France when her Aunt Rosa felt that it was becoming unsafe for the two of them.
I had an instinct to live and I was not bitter from the war,” Fixler said.
Fixler, who is now 86, moved after the war to the United States. She said she spent years wishing she had pictures from her childhood.
And then, one day, she got a call from Daniel Patt, a Google software engineer and the creator of Numbers to Names. Patt had used his AI-powered tool to identify Fixler in a group photo taken during the war, a photo she had never seen before.
For Fixler, seeing herself in the wartime photo was a powerful reminder of her past and a chance to reclaim a part of her history that had been lost.
“I think it’s very important for people to know what happened during the Holocaust,” she said. “This is part of my life, part of my story.”
Blanche’s face in the archive photo on the left, was previously listed as unidentified – she knew about the family photo on the right.
Patt’s ‘Numbers to Names’ project continues to analyze millions of faces in historic photographs, using facial recognition technology to connect dots and identify individuals.
The hope is that by putting names to faces, more Holocaust victims and survivors can be honored, their stories preserved, and their memories cherished. It’s a small but significant step in restoring dignity and providing comfort to families, and in memorializing the millions of individuals who perished in the Holocaust.
“It’s so important to identify these photos,” says Scott Miller, director of curatorial affairs at Holocaust Museum. “You’re restoring some semblance of dignity to them, some comfort to their family, and it’s a form of memorial for the entire Jewish community.”
Blanche is in the middle of the front line – previously only three people in this photo had been identified.
“We all know the figure – six million Jews were killed – but it’s really one person six million times. Every person has a name, every person has a face,” he said.
