How AI is helping track down photos of holocaust victims

For many survivors of the Holocaust the hope to find surviving photos of their families was all but lost, writes Cathy Free. But a Google engineer has now created a way to identify archive images using artificial intelligence

Blanche Fixler, middle front between two smaller children, spent some time in a displaced person's camp in France after WW2 ended (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Miriam Ofer)

Blanche Fixler survived the Holocaust because her aunt sent her to an orphanage when she was six as the Nazis invaded Europe during the Second World War.

Her mother, grandmother and two older siblings were murdered with around 450,000 other Jews in the Belzec extermination camp in Poland, and her father ended up at a labour camp in Siberia.

She moved to the United States after the war, and assumed all of her family mementoes were long gone, especially since her family’s apartment in Krakow was ransacked by the Nazis during the German occupation.