Washington, D.C., July 12, 2023.
Mike Edwards, Joel Hammers, and Josh Fronduti shot some video and photos at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shapell Center Archives.
There was nothing too unusual about that, but this time they were joined by Matthew Rozell, Ellen (the Fixer) Haber, and her husband Irv the Physicist. And this group gathered for an absolutely unique event: the Archivists took certain items from their safe place of eternal storage and allowed them to be photographed.
These items included the negatives of the April 1945 “George Gross photos” — and several pieces of original art by Ervin Abadi.
We know it looks like Mike is contemplating a daring snatch-and-grab of these priceless artifacts, but of course he is visualizing the camera movement that he will later ask Josh to execute.
The photos are, as you probably know, an essential part of the “Magdeburg train” story. When Matthew Rozell first interviewed tank commander “Red” Walsh (July 26, 2001) and learned about the train incident, he also learned that there were at least a half-dozen photos of the people on the train, taken by tank commander George Gross. The search for these photos led Rozell to Gross, who not only had much more to tell about the whole incident than Walsh did, but did indeed possess prints that had been made from these negatives in 1945. Rozell’s friendship with Walsh and Gross opened wide the doors to new connections, new revelations, and new mysteries…
The Gross family shared scans of the photos with Matt, who posted them to the Living History website he had been building with his students. So the world knows what the images look like — but what we’ve seen before today are low-resolution scans of decades-old prints.
Now at last, our team was able to examine the well-preserved negatives, the actual film that was exposed on April 13th and 14th of 1945.
Thanks to Josh Fronuti’s steady hands and state-of-the-art camera, these images can now be digitally archived — and studied — in far greater detail than ever before.
Irv, Ellen, and Matt — and even the archivist — fell under a sort of spell, suddenly whispering in the presence of these images from 1945. Small wonder: these are the faces and shapes that have been at the center of Matthew Rozell’s labor of love for more than 20 years. And at the moment these photos were taken, somewhere on that train was Ellen’s relative Ervin Abadi.
The Abadi family has a glorious collection of Ervin’s original work, and donated some of the prize pieces to the USHMM, where they were photographed and have been shared far and wide through the internet. But as with the slides from April 13-14, 1945, having access to the originals gave our team a chance to take higher-resolution photos than ever before.
“Victory” — a widely-reproduced watercolor by Abadi, painted while he was recovering at the hospital at Hillersleben. As a trained artist he would have been familiar with Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, so it’s not surprising he evokes it so strongly here.
A striking Abadi painting never before seen by any of us. When this photo of the painting was shared with Ervin’s granddaughter Galia, she remarked that all of these women reminded her of her grandmother. She mused that perhaps Ervin was trying to keep her alive in his memory…
Contemporary photos by Matthew A. Rozell and Mike Edwards