The photos are now safely preserved in the archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, where they continue serving a purpose their creators didn’t intend. “When we look at the registration photographs taken in the camp, we stand face to face with real people,” said museum spokesperson Pawel Sawicki. “[We] look into their eyes, guess their emotions, notice individuality in images that were meant to dehumanize.”

This is precisely the effect they had on Amaral when she stumbled on 14-year-old Czesława Kwoka’s mugshot in 2016. Staring at her screen in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Amaral saw a frightened child, her frail frame swallowed by an oversized uniform, her lip bleeding from a guard’s blow. “I couldn’t forget her face or stop thinking about her,” Amaral said. Having begun colorizing historic photos the previous year, she opened the image in Photoshop and started to paint. (This August, Amaral published 200 colorized photographs in a book with historian Dan Jones.)

This spring, Amaral’s colorized portrait of Kwoka went viral online, and the staff at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was so impressed that Amaral was given access to its entire archive of registration photos.“My ultimate goal would be to colorize them all, but that would take years,” Amaral said. “If I can tell at least 200 or 300 individual stories, I’ll feel satisfied.”