“Before there was a number, there was a name: Aron Löwi.
Five days in Auschwitz and a photograph that survived his tormentors.
To remember is to resist.”

Who was Aron Löwi?
Aron Löwi was a Jewish merchant from Zator , a small town in Poland. On March 5, 1942, his name was reduced to a number: 26406. Transferred from the prison in Tarnów to Auschwitz, he was 62 years old—old enough to have known a full life, young enough to still hope for peace. He died five days later , on March 10, 1942 .

What the photographs reveal:
The three portraits (frontal, profile, and three-quarter view) follow the protocol of the camp’s identification service. Aron
‘s striped jacket bears the triangular badges prescribed by the SS.

• Yellow to mark Jewish identity ;
• Red for the category “political” .

In many cases, these triangles were superimposed to create a two-colored six-pointed star — a system that depersonalized and classified prisoners through colors and categories .

In his sunken eyes, in the still-visible bruises, we read disbelief , exhaustion , and that form of silent resistance in the face of the unimaginable. The photographs were taken at the moment when heads were shaved, personal belongings confiscated, and a name replaced by a number .

Five days, a single line in the register.
A register page dated  March 10, 1942  , documents the administrative registration of  Aron Löwi . As with so many others:  no grave, no farewell  —just a brief line in a notebook and a few photographs. Early deaths—often within the first week—were frequent:  hunger, cold, disease, violence .

Portraits as evidence — and as restitution.
The  Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preserves tens of thousands of registration photographs  today   — only a fraction of the total collection destroyed during the Nazi retreat. Restoration and contextualization projects like  Faces of Auschwitz give back a face, a biography, a voice  to those whom the bureaucracy of murder   had reduced  to codes .

These images are  legally admissible evidence , but also  moral dialogues : they compel us to look, to name, and to recognize the person behind the striped uniform. Every time we   utter  the name Aron Löwi ,  the machine that claimed to be able to erase him  fails anew .

Why look any further?
Because photography  has outlived those who took it  .
Because  memory lasts longer than hatred .
Because  remembrance is a form of resistance  —a way to  give Aron Löwi  and so many others back what was violently taken from them:  their humanity .