GRAMERCY — Sally Enfield Rabinowitz has always had a tough time talking about the Holocaust.
At times, even reading about it caused her to burst into tears.
She didn’t live through it — she’s only 17-years-old. But her relatives did, and although Rabinowitz didn't know much about what they went through, the limited information she did have was enough to give the historical atrocity a powerful resonance.
So this summer, Rabinowitz decided to uncover the unknown pieces of her family’s story. Over the course of three weeks, she toured Europe with her mother, visiting old homesteads and gravesites and the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“I think when you’re learning about history, it’s kind of hard for you to imagine it unless you have a specific example of it,” said Rabinowitz, a student at Friends Seminary on East 16th Street. “I had a specific example, and it happened to be my family.”
Rabinowitz documented her entire journey, from start to finish, in photographs shot mostly on black-and-white film. Her mother, Jill Enfield, is a professional photographer, and her father, Richard Rabinowitz, is the founder of Digital Photo Academy.
But as she found out, the family connection to photography goes back further than that. Her mother’s relatives, German Jews originally known as the Ehrenfelds, owned five camera stores in and around Frankfurt. They were well-respected members of the community, before Hitler came to power and the persecution and genocide ensued.
“They were very, very privileged,” Rabinowitz said. “It was taken away from them so quickly.”
Rabinowitz and her mother started in England and then moved on to Frankfurt, hitting up museums and city archives on their journey. Rabinowitz wrote in her journal every day, documenting each discovery as it happened.
“It was really hard for me,” she said. “That’s why the photography really helped because it always calms me.”
Throughout her journey, Rabinowitz learned how Ernst Leitz, who founded the Leica camera factory, and his family helped her relatives leave Europe during that tumultuous time and secure passage to America, providing them with letters of recommendation and jobs.
She learned how her family was able to move to New York and later Miami, thanks to the Leitz family’s kindness.
She learned that the family opened more camera shops in America and changed its name to Enfield to simplify the pronunciation.
And she learned how her family didn’t escape entirely unscathed. Her great grandfather and great great uncle were arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Rabinowitz and her mother toured the camp on their trip. They saw block No. 5, where her relatives were held and treated like animals.
“Oh man, that was awful,” Rabinowitz said. “They were luckily not there for very long.”
In the end, both men made it out of the camp alive, although the experience had an indelible effect on their lives.
When Rabinowitz and her mother returned home, Rabinowitz had shot 17 rolls of film. She decided to put those photos into an audio slideshow, complete with her own narration of the family’s story.
So far, a few relatives have seen the video, and Rabinowitz said she plans to spread it even further.
“The whole point of me doing this was to keep the memory alive,” she said. “I didn’t want my family to be forgotten.”
