Post­ed by Bec­ca Kantor

Last Folio: A Pho­to­graph­ic Mem­o­ry offers a haunt­ing glimpse into the traces of van­ished Jew­ish life in Slo­va­kia, the first coun­try to instate Nazi Germany’s anti-Jew­ish reg­u­la­tions. These pho­tographs by Yuri Dojc — whose own grand­fa­ther was one of the many Slo­va­kian Jews deport­ed to con­cen­tra­tion camps — cap­ture aban­doned Jew­ish books, school­rooms , syn­a­gogues, and ceme­ter­ies in poignant detail, attest­ing to both the rich­ness of this her­itage and its dis­in­te­gra­tion dur­ing the Holocaust. 

The images in Last Folio are on dis­play at the Staats­bib­lio­thek zu Berlin (the Berlin State Library) until August 1, and will be shown at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty in Med­ford, MA from Sep­tem­ber 10-Decem­ber 6. You can also get a taste of Dojc’s beau­ti­ful pho­tographs below:

Relat­ed Content:

Bec­ca Kan­tor is the edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and its annu­al print lit­er­ary jour­nal, Paper Brigade. She received a BA in Eng­lish from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia and an MA in cre­ative writ­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of East Anglia. Bec­ca was award­ed a Ful­bright fel­low­ship to spend a year in Esto­nia writ­ing and study­ing the coun­try’s Jew­ish his­to­ry. She lives in Brooklyn.