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“I could feel them pounding in bed,” she recalls. “I said you better not breathe or sneeze – you’re dead.”
Blanche survived – she was lucky, her six million Jews like her were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War II. Over a million names of these people are unknown.
Now, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool (developed by Daniel Patt, a software engineer at Google) is able to extract from hundreds of thousands of historical photographs several faces of both victims and survivors. It may hold the key to naming the crab.
I found Blanche in a war photo she had never seen before.
The software tried to match millions of faces to find matches for people already identified in one photo but not in another.
Daniel’s website Numbers to Names uses facial recognition technology to analyze people’s faces. Then search for stock photos that might match.
That investigative work could help identify individuals in currently unidentified photographs by combining the dots. Blanche, now 86 and living in New York, was familiar with the family photo on the bottom right, but had never seen the group photo on the left, taken in France during the war.