Rosanna Weaver is programme manager for executive compensation As You Sow.







*****







Her face looks at the camera in a way that

is totally different to how teenagers take selfies now. There’s no elaborate

expression, but there is, for some reason, a hint of a smile. Maybe the

instinct to smile when a camera is pointed overcomes her in the moment.







But this is not a sharable moment. Her name

is Czesława Kwoka, and her photograph has been colorized, but even in the black

and white original the uniform of Auschwitz-Birkenau is unmistakable.















The colorization is by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral, and it brings to

life a young person who died many years ago. Her face stares out at us across

the decades. In one photograph, she wears her camp-issued headscarf and looks

up and to the side. She is pretty, but she is thin. Her hair is roughly cut

short. Her lip is cut. The photographer who takes her pictures later testifies

that she has just been beaten by a guard. Later, when he is ordered to destroy

them, The photographer risks his life to save some of the pictures, including

those of Czesława.







She is deported to Auschwitz, along with

her mother in 1942. It’s not clear why, her family is Catholic, not Jewish, but

her uniform has a red triangle alongside her prisoner number, that means

political enemy, so it’s possible that someone in her family is in some

organization that the Nazis dislike.







She’d be 92 now if she had survived. She might still be alive, lots of people live to be 92 or older.















But she does not survive. All that remain

of her are those three photographs, now colorized, staring out from our new

technology, and our wondering of what she might make of this new world.







She arrives in Auschwitz in December 1942.

Some weeks later, in February 1943, someone decides that her life isn’t worth

her reaching 92, or reaching one more day. They inject phenol, a poisonous

acid, into her heart.







She is 14 years old.