Identifying Unmarked Family Photos: Hanna and Isak Hakel

We've all run across them: those unmarked family photos - old ones, of sometimes beautiful people. Sometimes they are mixed up with our own, known ancestors' photos; some sit in antique shops, their eyes trying to tell us their stories, now lost, along with their names.

But sometimes there are clues, and with a bit of luck, we can give that face a name.

My aunt lives in Johannesburg, South Africa; my father (her brother) lives in the Los Angeles area; while I'm up in Seattle. I wanted family photos, which my aunt had. But she didn't know how to get them to me and none of us wanted to take our chances with 100-year-old photos and the international mail. My aunt is - how shall I say this? - not a computer person. My father arranged for someone in South Africa to scan the photos - page by page from the antique albums. 


Since I knew that the photos were going to come to me digitally and were in many cases had no identifying marks on them, I requested that I receive scans of the full page from each scrapbook, in addition to the individual pictures. This would allow me to see what was grouped together and the relative sizes of the pictures. I also requested that for loose photos, no borders be cropped away; this would help me where there was a photo studio name or other detail that might identify two photos taken by the same camera.

When the pages came back, the photos we were most easily able to identify, obviously, were of people we knew. This photo, for example, is of Hanna Hakel:

My father was able to identify her easily, as she was his grandmother, and lived with him and his family when he was growing up. Hanna (Bot) Hakel was born in 1882 in Vekshny, Lithuania. On 16 March 1901, she married Isak-Faibusch Hakel, in Libau (Liepaja), Latvia. Isak-Faibusch was born 9 December 1872 in Riga, and died 15 September 1927, in Libau. He is buried in the Liepaja Jewish Cemetery. 

Here is the picture as it is in the album, on the page*

The photo of Hanna is at the top right, with another photo of her below it. Below that, though, is a photo of a man. It appears to be the same size, and mounted to a nearly identical mat.

Here is the individual scan of that photo:

Without seeing the two photos together in the album, and without seeing the surrounding mat, it would be hard to see the similarities between the two photos - but they are still there. 

If you look behind the subject of each photo, the background has variations to it - a light-colored moon-shaped area to the right. It is identical in both photographs.

So, without having any writing on the photos such as names of people, places, or photo studio, we were still able to determine that these two photos were likely taken at the same photo studio, probably around the same time (given the similarity of the mat) - if not the same day.

It was a reasonable conclusion that the unnamed man was Hanna's husband, Isak-Faibusch Hakel.

I was able to ascertain with more certainty when I asked my aunt about the picture. Before I told her who I thought it was, I asked: "Do you have any idea who this man is?"

She replied, "I know he is one of my grandfathers, but I don't know his name. I never met either of them and don't know their names."

Once I told her his name, she remembered another detail: Isak-Faibusch Hakel, her grandfather in the photo, died of tuberculosis.

*of the magnetic-page album whose glue is eating this photo to death as I write this. Ugh - it hurts.

Long Lost Cousins: Pretty As A Picture

Note: This was originally published on my companion blog, Desperado Penguin, on April 25, 2012.

Last summer, I wrote about my late cousin Isak Hakel, who died, taking his sad history with him and leaving me with memories only of a joyful man.

At the time of his death, I was working with the Latvia State Historical Archive to retrieve the history of the Hakel family, and specifically to retrieve photographs of any family members. One of the most amazing things I discovered the Archives holds is old passport photos - apparently, it was necessary to have a passport for identification purposes, and so nearly everyone had one taken in the 1920s and 1930s, and many of these photos still exist.

I had sent Isak all the photos from my grandmother's collection - photos of his mother, father, sister, and grandparents. There was one large wedding photo that Isak was in, and he told me, he knew all the people in the photo. He treasured them and was obviously, in spite of our difficulty communicating, grateful to get them.

But there was one photo I did not have, and it troubled me: Ruth.

Ruth Hakel was Isak's little sister. She was born in 1939, two years before the German Army invaded Liepaja and destroyed the majority of the Jewish inhabitants. She died on November 3, 1943, according to a Yad Vashem card filed by her father that I found online. A short life, for which only a name and some dates remain - and even the death date cannot be stated with certainty.

I wanted to give Isak a picture of his sister, but the archive moved slowly, and it took over a year to receive the records I requested, which arrived just this past week. There were many treasures among in the packet, but the one I hoped for was not to be found.

I began to enter the data into my family tree, and sort through records, and cross-check new information against things I had learned before, from other sources. When I got to Ruth Hakel, I went back to the Yad Vashem website, and looked up the Page of Testimony that was filed for her by her father and brother. The website had been updated recently, and to my amazement, I discovered that along with the Pages of Testimony were now photographs of those who perished.

And there she was.

Ruth Hakel

 Born 1939, Libau, Latvia.

 Died 1943, Auschwitz.

The card and photograph were placed in the museum by her surviving brother, Isak Hakel.

I asked him many questions, yet it never occurred to me to ask him for a photograph. He got it to me anyway.

My Great-Grandmother Hanna Hakel (1882-1957) with

(left) Isak Hakel 1930-2011.

 (right) Romy Hakel 1933-1943.

from my grandmother's albums.

When You Least Expect It: Long Lost Cousins

Note: This was originally published on my companion blog, Desperado Penguin, on August 1, 2011.

It was eighteen months ago that I began my genealogical research that discovered that I have an elderly cousin in Israel. If genealogy is about anything, it's about people and history, and this man was not only a link to my family and its secrets, but also living history: a survivor of a Jewish ghetto in Latvia, then of Auschwitz, then of the cold war era Soviet Union.

I learned about him quite by accident, through a historian whose website documented the destruction of the Jewish community in Libau, Latvia - he guided me to a source for records on my family, but also mentioned that there was still a family member living, and led me to someone who provided me with an email address for my cousin, Isak Hakel.

I knew of Isak Hakel, because I had copies of some old photos that belonged to my grandmother, Rachel Hakel - who was his aunt. There was a part of me that was vaguely aware that I had this cousin, and that he might still be living. His father was Schmuel Hakel, known to me as "Uncle Samuel" from Israel, and unfortunately my only interaction with Uncle Samuel was a card he sent me as a child, which I still have, tucked away in my closet a box of treasured letters and cards. He signed his name.

Standing: Schmuel and Ida Hakel (died in Auschwitz), Beno Hakel (shot by SS)

Seated: Isak Hakel and brother Romy (died at Auschwitz), Hanna Hakel, Joseph Hakel.

The general outline of the family history is this: My grandparents, Harry and Rae, were originally from Libau, Latvia, but left sometime in the mid-1930's, emigrating to South Africa. World War Two came along and swept away my grandfather's family in its entirety - so complete was the destruction that he could never say their names again. Granny Rae's side of the family had better luck - if Jews in Latvia in 1941 can be said to have any luck at all - two of her three brothers survived the war. A quick look at the history of Libau tells how extraordinary this was: Of Libau's total pre-war Jewish population of 7,000, fewer than 200 survived.

Schmuel Hakel and his family - wife Ida, sons Romy and Isak, and daughter Ruth - somehow survived the roundups and mass executions in Libau long enough to be documented among the 800 or so residents of the city's Jewish Ghetto. After that point, it is hard to know precisely what happened: The family lore is that Schmuel was sent to Auschwitz and had to choose which of his two sons he could keep with him. He chose Isak, it is said, even though Romy was his favorite; but he believed Romy was smarter and had a better chance of surviving on his own.

If this sounds a little Sophie's Choice to you, it does to me too. The facts are straightforward: Schmuel and Isak survived. Schmuel's wife, Ida, and children Romy (age about 10) and Ruth (age four), perished.

Of course I was extraordinarily curious to learn the truth of the matter, and find out what really happened to my family. How had Uncle Schmuel managed to keep his family alive in Libau for so long? What really happened at the gates of Auschwitz? What happened at Auschwitz? And after the war, under the communists?

I wrote to Isak and was disappointed to immediately discover that he did not speak any English - most unfortunate for doing any research, or doing much of anything really, particularly by email. He seemed to speak a dialect of Yiddish, but even my efforts to communicate with him through interpreters ran into difficulty: his replies to me were short, often badly typed, and the dialect he spoke was evidently quite an obscure one.

I emailed him my grandmother's old family photos. He thanked me for the "bilden," and sent me an assortment of seemingly random emails: A powerpoint of elaborate topiaries in Florida was one that stood out. I wasn't sure what to make of them but it pleased me nonetheless to receive them - he seemed to want to communicate as well. Every email I sent received an email in return - just not a reply to my writing in particular.

I took a chance and contacted one of the people mentioned in one email, as she seemed to have constructed some outlines of our family tree on a website, and I was thrilled when she replied, in English, and offered to interpret. She was the cousin of Isak's wife, and through her I learned that Isak, too had questions - starting with how I was related to him, and what had happened to his cousins, his Aunt Rae's children, and so on. I answered his questions and sent him more photos - of me and my family, and my cousins. I asked my own questions, and he replied with the facts about the War: Uncle Joseph, Schmuel and Rae's other brother, fled to the USSR ahead of the Nazi invasion, and so there was some family there, and Isak was in touch with them.

He did not answer my questions about Auschwitz, his mother, his sister - even the simplest questions on the subject received no response.

Receiving little of what I was looking for, I was glad of the information I received, but gradually gave up on getting anything useful - by my own standards - from Isak Hakel.

Then my father came along. Eager to connect with me, he went to great lengths for obtain copies of old family photos that still remained with his sister in Johannesburg - having numerous albums scanned, page by page and picture by picture. He brushed up on his Yiddish and wrote to Isak Hakel, a cousin whose existence he had been completely unaware of.

So there we were - an elderly man in Israel, a computer programmer in California, an amateur genealogist in Seattle, communicating with pictures and intermediaries and, on one occasion that thrilled Isak, Google Translator.  We were a family, albeit with none of the shared memories that generally helps define the relationships. Instead, we had a tremendously sad shared loss - a searing pain that can still be felt across the generations.

But Isak was the only one with any true knowledge of what actually happened in 1941 and 1942, and it did not matter what language he was asked in, he simply did not care to discuss it. Instead, he filled my inbox with links to funny Hanukkah videos on Youtube. He sent photos of him and his wife, enjoying some ice cream in the sun.

He looked happy and healthy, which I found extraordinary given the incredible tragedies that define his childhood, the unspeakable loss he experienced and I imagined him carrying with him: an unbearable great weight. I do not know what his memories were or how he bore them; what was fascinating history and a subject of great interest to me was just that: his private memories of his family and his own childhood. It was none of my business, although he did not say so.

Isak Hakel.

I tried to learn about my family and my history and what I learned was this: You can choose to be happy and enjoy your life, no matter where you start from or where life takes you.

The stream of email forwards from Isak Hakel stopped abruptly in May, and I got a bad feeling. I emailed and received no reply. I emailed his wife's cousin and learned he had died, age 80.

When someone dies, there will always be something we wish we had said or done - something more, whatever that something is. I don't know what else it was I wanted to do for Isak Hakel, as I was only just beginning to understand who and what he was - and then he was no more. He did not give me what I wanted; instead he gave me something far greater. And yet, I never met the man.