Faces of Loss: Remembering Those Who Perished focuses on the victims of the Holocaust, whose families later immigrated to Canada and now live in Vancouver. Survivor and other Vancouver families contributed their precious few pre-war photographs of family members who were lost during the Holocaust. In many cases, no photographs remain of those who perished. The exhibition serves to remember and mourn these victims while restoring the human, personal element to what has become an abstraction of numbers. A total of 426 images were submitted for the exhibition by 130 community members. The photographs have been grouped by family and organized alphabetically by name.
This original exhibition was produced by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 2005. It was developed with the goal of providing a space of mourning for survivors who carry an obligation to remember and to facilitate the transference of memory to the next generation. Within a public space, the exhibition encouraged visitors to bear witness to the private losses of those within our own community. The online exhibition is an extension of the process of commemoration and collective remembrance.