Seventy years have passed since the liberation of prisoners held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. More than a million people were killed there between 1940 and 1945, when Soviet troops liberated the camp. Professor Rob Heller took the photos at Auschwitz in 2007 while in Poland to attend the opening of his Living On photo exhibit.
After writing a psychology class paper about the photos and stories of Tennessee’s Holocaust survivors from the “Living On” website, student Ryan Johnson decided to take the project a step further, and shared his paper with the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. When the commission’s executive director read it, she asked Johnson to present it at Annual Day of Remembrance, held in April in Nashville.