A Photographic Archive

New images of the past

Over the summer, while I was digging through the Gerbner Family Archives, I found hundreds of photographic negatives. As I held them up to the light, I realized that many were from the 1930s and 40s, and contained images I had never seen. Excited, I took these negatives to PhotoLounge in Philadelphia: they specialize in digitizing negatives, and they have been scanning and digitizing these images the past few months.

Today, they sent me the results: I feel both amazed and overwhelmed. The negatives include hundreds of images of Opapa’s visits to Rimóc in Northern Hungary; a few dozen of his family home in Budapest; and close to a thousand photos documenting his travels in 1939: from Budapest to Venice, Paris, Mexico, Cuba, and New Orleans.

I have just started going through everything, but for today’s post, I want to share a few photos that show my grandfather as a 19-20 year old, as he traveled from Budapest to the United States. I know where some of them are taken, but others are a mystery.

This one, for example, is probably in Havana, Cuba in November 1939:

I think the following photo was taken on the same day. Or at least, Opapa is wearing the exact same outfit (minus the hat):

The next photo was in a folder labeled “New Orl.,” but I’m not sure whether it’s New Orleans or Paris. Any thoughts?

The following photo was in the same folder, titled “New Orl.” Opapa is wearing a different outfit (a bowtie, not a tie, and a different jacket). It looks more like Paris than New Orleans to me, but I’m not sure:

There were also several photos of the S.S. Flandre — the oceanliner that Opapa took to Mexico. As I wrote about in a previous post, there were over 100 Jewish refugees on this ship that were denied entry into both Cuba and Mexico, and they were later deported back to Europe. This photo is from before their arrival in Cuba, as the S. S. Flandre crossed the Atlantic:

And finally, I will end with a rather hilarious photo, in which Opapa decided to forefront a donkey (or a mule?) as he trekked across what I assume is Mexico:

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Nuts to crack:

• While the photographs were semi-organized, there were also a lot of photographs that were clearly in the wrong folder, so it’s difficult to be sure of many of the dates or locations. If you can spot any landmarks and are sure of the location, please let me know!