Images of Auschwitz: Talk with Paul Salmons

good evening I'm Miriam hire the senior director for external affairs here at the Museum of Jewish heritage and I want to welcome you to tonight's program picturing Auschwitz in which we will learn about the so called ash wits album the only photographic evidence we have of prisoner selections at the Nazi killing center this program is presented as part of the museum's week-long series in commemoration of international Holocaust Remembrance Day January 27th marks the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau each year it is the day on which the international community honors the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of the Nazis we're pleased to welcome Paul Simon's tonight former program director of the Center for Holocaust education at University College London and the lead author of the UN manual how to teach about the Holocaust tonight speaker has been at the forefront of research on how Holocaust education can help us understand mass violence and can strengthen efforts toward genocide prevention Paul Simon's is also most recently a curator of the groundbreaking exhibition now it's not long ago not far away which will open here at the Museum on may 8th we've been honored to have him with us this week following our announcement of the exhibition and we hope you'll take the opportunity to learn more by visiting the museum's web site I'm speaking of websites I would be remiss if I didn't extend a special welcome to all of our livestream viewers tonight thank you for being with us virtually for the following presentation thank you for the very kind introduction thank you for the invitation to be with you this evening and and everyone here thank you for coming along on such a bitter night it was so cold right I almost turned back myself so thank you for persevering I do appreciate it I'm gonna speak about these images these photographs of Auschwitz and given such a cold night the term I'm going to use path or part of this discussion of these photographs is frozen moments the way that an image captures a moment in time it seems apt but it starts in early April 1945 at the Nazi concentration camp of Durham it'll bow that's in Germany's hearts Mountains that's the land of fairy tales the fairy tales that we read to you when you were young of Rapunzel them Sleeping Beauty this is the landscape where those images were those stories were first told thrilled young children for generations but in the period that we're looking at it's also the place of the camp Dora myth labelled which in early April 1945 stood almost deserted the SS had abandoned the camp to escape the advancing Allied armies force marching some 35,000 starving prisoners more than 200 miles deeper into the Reich shooting thousands on the roadside there were no longer able to keep up so then this deserted camp in the tunnels and in the quarries there was an eerie silence hanging over that place 20,000 prisoners had perished their exhaustion disease and starvation hundreds of corpses still littered the ground and a few a handful of prisoners the sick and the dying too weak to march still remained there these are the the few that the SS did not have time to murder as they made their desperate and disorderly retreat one of those one of the dying remnant was a young woman could Lily Jacob just 19 years old and sick from typhus and weak with hunger she drifted in and out of consciousness until roused by shouting from outside and the sound of cheering with a tremendous effort she dragged herself from her bunk and her frail body staggered outside as the first American soldiers arrived in the camp the earth seemed to pitch up before her and she collapsed onto the ground gentle unseen hands lifted her and carried her to another barrack one that had formerly been a barrack of the SS and she was placed in a bed in that former SS barracks it was the cold that woke her as she climbed out of bed seeking some warm clothing she found by the side of the bed a kind of chest of drawers and pulling open one of those drawers and searching through it underneath some folded pajamas she found this object lying in the bottom of the drawer was a photograph album with a beige linen cover turning it opening those pages she found more than 200 carefully mounted photographs inside the staggering thing is that those photographs were taken on the very day that Lily herself had arrived in Auschwitz Birkenau as she turned the pages she looked upon the faces of her at some of her own family including these two young boys her little brother's nine-year-old Israel and eleven-year-old zelich another photographs she saw the faces of her grandparents October and her aunts four young children their rabbi their friends their neighbors the people from her community and they're on another photograph in the front row standing there with her arms hanging awkwardly by her selves was an image of herself staring back at her from out of these pages from from 500 miles away in Auschwitz 11 months and a lifetime ago what Lily could not know was that the immense personal value of these photographs would be equaled only by their album's historical significance this single album with these couple of hundred photographs pasted into it which could so easily have been lost hold the only series of photographs ever found that document the murder process at Auschwitz Birkenau that is the arrival of the trains the selection process sending people to either work or death the long walk the short walk to the gas chambers photographs of sorting the belongings of the Dead all of those photographs every one that we have in existence contained within the pages of that one photograph album so those photographs discovered by Lily Jacob are among the most important of the Holocaust a striking visual record of the last moments of Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944 they're so important so valuable that they have been used as evidence in post-war trials and they are reproduced in museums and exhibitions today across the world including in the exhibition here of the permanent exhibition in this museum and also in the exhibition on outfits that we created that she's at the moment in Madrid and as you know we'll be coming here we're very delighted to say in May of these photographs are reproduced and republished in countless books and articles they have become the key source for representing what we might call the Auschwitz landscape in documentaries the camera searches them searches them for meaning focuses on small details of human interaction lingers on the expressions of the people in the crowd and sweeps across the scene to give some sense of scale Hollywood directors go even further they restage the scenes that we see in these images using the photographs to clothe and position their actors as they strive to bring a sense of authenticity to their fictional films and now here again they appear before you in this PowerPoint presentation what is it that makes these photographs so compelling why do we return to them again and again for theorists of film and photography such as Andre Bazin and Roland Bart's the photographic image has a special power to convey truthfulness what is that quality come from they argue that it's from the very process by which photographs are produced we have other images of the past but a painting of course is made by the brushstroke of a human hand the scene as it's depicted in a drawing or a photo or in painting may never actually have existed outside of the artists own imagination but for a photograph to exist it's created by the light reflected from an object in the world or a scene that passes through a camera lens and onto photosensitive material for Bart therefore every photograph is itself what he calls a certificate of presence in order for that image to exist this image to exist what we see there must also have existed when we hold one of these photographs then in our hand it can feel almost as if we are looking directly on the past it's as though we hold in our hand a slice of time or a frozen moment but how pits a slice of time like this how far can an atom of time convey the full complexity of the past although it feels to us that there is this certificate of presence this truthfulness so Susan Sontag has argued that actually to have knowledge of the world we have to understand how things function that is how they relate one to another over time yet in a photograph we freeze time photographs Susan Sontag may argue lack explanatory power simply because they depicts these moments rather than the historical processes that lie beneath them and so a single photograph cannot reveal the interconnectedness between events if photographs atomize the past that means we have to make a special effort in reading them we have to try to see beyond that frozen moment we need to consider not only what each image shows but ask what else does it reveal we have to carefully contextualize each image and relate one image to another to try to integrate these separate than isolated moments into a bigger picture of a larger hole each photograph of course shows what a particular photographer considers to be important each photograph that exists is taken for a reason and therefore each in a sense can reveal its purpose in these images that we find in the so-called ashe wits album we encounter outfits not exactly as it was but from the photo of the photographer's perspective we see auschwitz through his lens and reading that more carefully it may reveal an attitude in a relationship to the events that we see and that are depicted there reflecting on that relationship between the photographer and his subject can actually reveal much about the ideas attitudes and the knowledge of the people at the time but in order to do this it's important to examine each photograph not only for what the image shows but also to consider what it reveals about the perspective of the person who took that photo we need to think also about the unwitting testimony that it provides what can we deduce or infer from the image that the photographer was not specifically intending what does this tell us about the photographer's knowledge experience understanding of the place what the photographer's reveal about themselves and finally we need to reflect upon the diverse perspectives that different photographs can reveal different truths that can emerge and consider how they might relate one to another for a more full and nuanced picture of that complex past so we're going to take a few of these so-called outfits album photographs together and taking this one for instance I'd like you just to spend a moment studying their image and thinking what does this photograph actually reveal have we read an image like this what does a photograph like this reveal about a world so far beyond our own experience beyond our own imagination even what would you say the photograph is off what's the subject of this photograph it's not certain who took the photographs that were pasted into this album but most likely it was perhaps in both of them two men this particular photograph taken probably either by the head of the camps photographic Department Bernhard Volta or his assistant a former school teacher Ernst Hofmann the main task of the department was photographing new prisoners when they for identification purposes the photography of other official work such as construction projects in 1942 SS doctors who performed medical experiments on prisoners also had those experiments photographed along with cases of disease and disability that the doctors found interesting it may be then that the photographs we see in this album were intended as a documentary record of the so-called work of this death camp what is it we see the Train which you see of course on the right has arrived inside the place we know as outer it's Birkenau a large crowd of people have spilled out of those wagons if you look closely you'll see that prisoners in striped uniforms begin to separate them into two large groups men and older boys on one side women and young children on the other they have heavy bundles slung over their backs those bundles hold all the belongings that they can carry pots and pans hair brushes cheese graters toothbrushes warm clothes the things the ordinary things needed for everyday life these are the things that people brought with them to a death camp that reveal to us about their knowledge their understanding of what was happening but the subject of the photograph of course is not that individual experience is a if you look at the way the photo is composed the individual people have little interest to the photographer's gaze this type of photograph we would describe as a tableau yeah the subject is not the individual person but the scene as a whole it's different from a portrait yeah the image at which the images that we saw before this is not a tableau the photographer is interested in these two children they're the subjects of his lens but here is a different kind of record a different kind of image not interested in the individual experience a scene is laid out before our eyes consider the photographer's position he's chosen elevated place appears to be standing on the train itself it's one of the things of course which gives us a clue to the identity that someone is able to do this someone can take photographs here this is not a clandestine photograph photographer is exposed this has been done with permission this is an official photograph it's carefully composed it's a professional photographer no they understand this is not done automatically of course with photo with cameras at that time so someone who knows what they're doing he would have used a light meter to register how much how much light will be coming into that camera and so for depending on how long the shutter would would remain open what split-second how much light would have to come in for it to be correctly exposed and so they would adjust the aperture of the camera the hole which will allow the light inside to the exact amount that would get the correct amount of detail in the photograph but varying the aperture whether you have a smaller or wider aperture also affects your depth of field yeah by which parts of the image are in focus and which parts are blurred in a portrait you might want to use a wider aperture because it throws the background out of focus ya can make the subject of the photo the portray stand out more a photograph like this you want detail in the distance as well as in the foreground and the mid-ground as well so he probably would have chosen a smaller aperture which requires a long the the the shutter to be open a little bit longer okay that means you can't do that if there's a lot of movement because things will blur so you have to have the right balance in other words yeah it's not a simple choice this is a well taken photograph carefully composed well exposed so there's a deliberate act here yeah this person knows what they're doing it's not a snapshot soon I mean you can read the photograph to learn something about the person who took it thinking about how it's composed it's actually some classic elements in composition which have been used here yeah the way that the the train leads your eye into the image yeah the the strong line of the train takes your eye from the foreground through the middle ground to the distance yeah it's a deliberate choice he's ensured that certain elements are visible within the scene if you follow that train line if you follow the train tracks from the left and the train itself from the right they're converging right so that also draws your eye down to the left and to the right you'll see a building on each side with a tall chimney again I would say this is deliberate the building on the left with the chimney is crematoria to the building on the right is crematoria 3 so the subject of the photograph is not the individual person or the individual experience but a tableau which documents a process so although Sontag of course is right that each photograph is only this moment in time and that to understand the world we need to understand how things connect over time if we read an image carefully you can sometimes see time passing within a frozen moment because we see the direction of travel in this Graff we see the purpose of what's happening here we see the fate of the people who are depicted in the image the Train indicates a journey this people have come from somewhere Laden down with the possessions of a life lived yeah there's a hinterland there there's a background as a community people have arrived in the moment is of unloading and separation the direction of travel is towards the gas chambers so this one single photograph narrates the process of destruction it shows a rival direction of travel and the place of murder in a single moment we can escape the frozen moment of time that's the photographer's interest right are we trapped by his gaze are we forced only to see the past as this Nazi photographer saw it to some extent we are right but we need to make a little more effort look more closely at the image he's not interested in the individuals and yet in this broad sweep of event when the images study more studied more closely the individual experience does emerge it's the unwitting testimony of the photograph I've tried to identify just a few of those moments fully closely at the circled areas you'll see on the left-hand side a mother carrying her baby a small child little closer to us still on the left a woman and perhaps a young boy of linked arms yeah there's a relationship there on the right hand side slightly further part of that image someone seems to be helping another with this heavy bundle of this pack there's some again human interaction there there's some care there there's some relationship which is happening and a little bit below that photograph that part of the photograph can you see a young boy staring back at you yeah there's someone gazing directly into the camera's lens he sees the photographer and he looks at the moment that the photograph is taken the photographer's not interested in him but the boy is interested in the act of the photographer yeah he's he emerges if he looked closely enough for him finally to the left of that young boy can you see a man in a striped uniform talking to a woman with a headscarf the man is one of the Sonderkommando one of the prisoners they were forbidden to speak to new arrivals rather than to tell them where to stand to tell them what to do with their baggage to go to this way or that way a few kind of cursory words if you look at that frozen moment and their body language it would appear that something more is being said to their yeah there's a moment maybe of intimacy or something else that she seems to be being said it's not just a direction that seems to be given me and yet that was forbidden one of the prisoners then who we can identify his name is Heinrich Price his standing in the foreground in his striped uniform in conversation with a young woman while the image captures only a slice of time and we cannot tell for how long they taught their body language indicates that price is not simply directing where the woman should stand more appears to be happening here we do know from other sources that some zonder commando whispered hurried words of advice telling young mothers for instance to pass their babies to a grandparent or a young boy to say that he is older that he's 18 and that he's learned a trade and that would be useful in the camp a few words not enough time for explanation and so barely understood by the new arrivals but which might help them pass the selection his Heinrich price caught here giving some words of advice to this young woman a moment unnoticed by the photographer but still caught unwittingly in his lens I mentioned the two buildings on the left and the right crematorium too and crematoria three know also that in the mid-ground on the left hand side is a single storied building it's somewhere before or opposite this building that the selection is being is taking place to decide who would go to work in the camp and who would be sent straight to the gas chambers and that same building if you identified it in me yeah you can see it in this one yeah the photographer then has moved yes is again why we think perhaps it's appears to be recording documenting the process of destruction yeah careful choice has been made the photographer has moved along the train to where the selection is taking place here the group you can see for yourself a group of men stand before an SS doctor think of the weather on that day now you can see something this is the summer of 1944 you can see from the light this is a hot day the men in uniform were wearing their caps and their hats shades them from the Sun none of the men lined up before them are wearing hats yeah if you look in their hands they're all holding the hat in their hands there's a issue of power here control how long does it take for that doctor to decide on the fate of the man standing in front of him how long's he spend deciding whether this person goes into the camp for hard manual work not chosen for life they're expected to be they're expected to perish there but chosen for work or being sent straight to their gasps how long does the doctor take to consider that decision of life and death it's difficult to say right because again we have a frozen moment of time but look more closely and although to'em is frozen in the stillness of the image we can see the length of time it takes for each decision to be made even in that still image note the distance between each group of men as they walk from the selection process this choice this moment being made towards that low building in the background and from there to the column of men at the top right of the photograph those men are on their way to the gas chambers the gaps separating each group show the short distance that's walked in what must only be a few seconds that it took to decide who would live and who would die does that tell us about the value of a human life in this place one doctor could make that decision hundreds even thousands of times in a single day a cursory examination a wave of his hand sent men women children and babies to their deaths today as I said the images from the really Jacob album this a schvitz album are used in museum exhibitions books and films the world over to convey something of the horror of what was happening at Birkenau but how effectively does this photograph really depict the atrocity how long do we think when a visitor is passing through a gallery how long do they stake to stop and study the image does she or he wonder who these men were their personalities their lives their loves their dreams do we spend any longer considering these men than did the doctor making the selection well do we share the gaze of the photographer and see only in an anonymous crowd being processed only the power and the actions of the photographer of the perpetrator I'm sorry elsewhere on other pages from the album we do see other individual portraits who've already mentioned Israel and zelich this is one of the most commonly reproduced photographs from the two hundred more than 200 inside that album why is that one of those that is so often selected and there in an exhibition or in a in a book you might only have two three photographs an exhibition you know five or six out of 200 this one appears again and again and again what is it about that photograph that causes curators and writers and documentary makers to return to this portrait perhaps it's because of the poignancy of their connection to the young woman who discovered the album it's a remarkable story right by chance she finds this album she opens the pages she sees her brothers perhaps it's because of the innocence that these two young boys represent it may be that curators authors and publishers reproduce this image because they feel it is the one with which their audience will most easily connect this is the one that will evoke strong feelings of sympathy with the victims for that of course marx radically from the intention of the photographer who took the image it's not what was in his mind when he directed the lens those two young voice so sometimes this is an image which is harder to see in a way the action of the photographer or the purpose of the photographer because when we see it we see something very differently then the photographer had in mind if we want to understand how the man taking this photograph saw these people they might choose a different portrait such as those on this page from the album these photographs are far more rarely reproduced inscribed on this page is the caption nixed mayor iron sets for Hagar Menna men no longer of any use at the top on the left hand side is a portrait of a Jewish man he sits awkwardly in a cane chair and looks uncomfortably into the camera he knows of course where he's being picked out of the 3,000 or so people to be photographed he knows that his size has made him a kind of object of curiosity to the photographer well we don't see is what he sees but you can imagine it an armed and uniformed SS man has again we said this is a professional photographer it's not a snap he is dropped down perhaps on one knee to be at eye level with this man sat in this chair just a short distance away from him and aimed his camera at him the power dynamics here couldn't be more explicit there is no question of course of permission being asked the photograph is simply taken at other times in other places it's likely that this man's physical size attracted other unwanted attention but at least in those situations he could have responded in some way here in Birkenau he is emasculated he is humiliated Photography becomes a brutal and degrading act an exercise of power accompanied by the constant threat of violence the photograph on the page at the bottom same page shows another group of people these who are unable to walk there's short distance to the gas chamber so they've been placed to one side and they're allowed to sit on the ground you see elderly people you see walking sticks they sit to one side as the selection continues they won't slow this process down then right afterwards an ambulance with a red cross painted on its side a deceptively reassuring sight of course an emblem of our so-called civilized modern world will connect them and drive them a short distance to their deaths this group also contains includes some of Lily Jacobs close relatives in the middle of the photograph four people are seated next to the Train the elderly couple on the left are Lily's grandparents abraham and shine delay yet jacob but why is this image then less reproduced than that of Lily's younger brothers other people here any less innocent is there murder any less of an outrage much representation of the Holocaust is intended to help the viewer to identify with the victims the photograph of the young brothers Israel and say Jacob undoubtedly evokes compassion and sympathy for they appear not so different to children we all know is easy to feel a sense of identification with them but shouldn't we feel an equal horror at the mistreatment and murder of people who may appear quite different from ourselves let's again look a little closer on the left the furthest to the left an elderly religious man his head covered and a scarf tied around his face we don't know his name and yet his appearance speaks simultaneously to a long cultural history a horrific act of brutality and to a form of spiritual resistance again contained within this one still image is a longer a longer history a longer period of time we can see beyond the frozen moment his head is covered by a kippa a circular cloth cap by which he honors his God many Jewish men who follow traditional religious custom grew their beard from young adulthood it's likely that this out li man had worn a beard all of his adult life he was a mark both of his personal and of his religious identity but it's evident from the scarf that recently again that passage of time he's been physically attacked this elderly man has been degraded and brutalized we have other photographs from a number of towns where German soldiers forcibly cut the beards of religious Jews for sport after this violent attack we might expect he would do all he could not to stand out the disappear to not draw more attention to himself and yet rather than going barefaced he's tied a scarf around his chin despite that making him far more conspicuous in doing so clearly it's not the intention of the photographer to capture this mark of his resilience even his courage his defiance perhaps by an old man who has turned an act of humiliation into one of personal dignity and yet it's there nonetheless if we choose to look beyond the perpetrators gaze which sees only a subjected mass and instead seek to see the individual human experience in 2007 another astonishing photograph album emerged the images it contains were also taken by the SS but with a very different purpose a different purpose to those in the Lilly Jacob album and these reveal different truths the Lilly Jacob album as I said documents the work of the camp the SS we see in these images are engaged in mass murder they're uniformed men dispassionately directing the killing process when we see them we might wonder what kind of men they were but really their lives and personalities are not the focus of the cameras attention and there are few clues in the photographs themselves as such they can safely remain as the monsters of our imagination Psychopaths cold sadistic killers at best and thinking men only obeying orders the photographs in the Lilly Jacob album that we see here do nothing to disturb those sorts of reassuring stereotypes that we might have they can remain safely contained within our imagination the new album is shockingly different in this regard this album overlaps in time with the Lili Jacob album it shows some of the same men who were intimately involved in the mass murder of Hungarian Jews but now in a very different context some of the photographs in this album are formal occasions a funeral service for five SS men that were killed in a bombing rate a ceremony to mark the building of a new hospital but many such as this one capture off-duty moments the killers at rest and play here we see mass murders sunbathing laughing seeing songs or playfully eating blueberries with the young women who assisted them in the camp the effect is striking and extremely disturbing we can no longer keep these men a safe distance from ourselves the anonymous and dehumanized figures of the Lilly Jacob album here they appear much more like us many of these photographs including this one were taken at an SS resort called Salah Jota a lodge set amidst pine trees by the river Sola in a region that was popular with tourists before the war it was an ideal base for hunting in the wooded hills hiking in the mountains and for outings to a nearby lake in these photographs then we see the human face of those we struggle hardest to understand here are the same men who organized and carried out the largest mass murder program in history here they are socializing relaxing enjoying themselves as they take a break from the killing it's striking to learn that they're still inside the region of the Auschwitz camp complex just a few miles from Birkenau where the smoke from their victims burning bodies rises from the crematoria and the open pits the album belonged to Carl hooker he's pictured here in the center of this photograph at the center of this wooden bridge his arms around two of a dozen young women who laughing huddled together and fool for the camera the album itself appears to be a memento of his career at Auschwitz he appears in almost every photograph it documents his time from when he arrived in the summer of 1944 the same time when the other photographs were taken the other album was compiled he arrived as adjutant to the new commandant of Auschwitz 1 now Fitz was divided into three large camps and some 49 very different times subcamps outfits one was the first the main camp as it was called initially intended and continued to function as a place of terror of the Polish population the new commandant of that ash for its one main camp Richard Beier arrived in the summer of 44 and he and hooker remained there until in January 1945 when the Nazis abandoned the camp the population of the Auschwitz camp complex was the size of a large town there were some 135 thousand prisoners four thousand men in the SS garrison spread across some 16 square miles three major camps and a large number of sub camps prisoners were forced to work huge farms in the German war industries in coal mines and stone quarries all of which required organization and management the adjutant's role the role played by Cal haka was in the words of Bears predecessor a more famous Commandant of the camp Rudolf Hoess the adjutant's role was to ensure that no important event in the camp remains unknown to the Commandant no important event in the camp remains unknown to the Commandant so this man who owned this album knew everything in detail that was going on hooker was among the leadership and command control of the Auschwitz camp complex he was close to the decision-makers he had full and detailed an intimate knowledge of the vast human suffering that was inflicted there and yet he had snapshots of himself at Auschwitz carefully pasted into the pages of a photograph album what does that reveal about hookers self-image how he felt about the position he held his duties his role as adjutant to the Commandant of Auschwitz was this a man only obeying orders was he forced to take part for fear of what would happen if he would refuse we might prefer to picture our perpetrators this way mindlessly compliance or having no choice as this gives us an easy explanation for why they committed these horrendous crimes but this album surely gives the lie to such calm comforting misconceptions hooker appears on almost every page beginning with a portrait of himself and richard bayer on the occasion of their promotions and continuing with the visits of Nazi dignitaries ceremonial occasions and these moments of relaxation this is an album celebrating the career and the so called achievements of a very willing perpetrator Kyle hooker it seems as a man who took pride in his work after all we do not preserve the moments the photographs of the moments of which we feel shame or guilt indeed it seems likely that hooker was posted to Auschwitz in May 1944 precisely because of his experience his vigor his skill in the administrating of a killing centre being drafted from his former position as adjutant at my donek to assist the new commandant the relatively inexperienced Richard Richard Baier nor was her 'kathy only so-called expert who was brought to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 several key personnel were identified who would ensure that the murder of Hungarian Jews the family for instance of Lili Jacob would proceed smoothly with lethal efficiency and brutal effectiveness the founding commandant of Auschwitz who have already mentioned Rudolf Hoess had been by this point promoted to the Inspectorate of the concentration camps in November 1943 so he'd left a Swiss but now he was brought back as commander of the SS garrison to oversee the program the murder of the Hungarian Jews that was actually named in his honor operation action hearse the murder of the Hungarian Jews hearse was an energetic killer involved himself in all details of the murder process he led visits to other killing sites such as hell no and Treblinka learn from their techniques and their innovations returning to Auschwitz also was hearses former adjutant Joseph Kramer Kramer had in the meantime being posted to Dachau and that's why the concentration camps now he returned as the Commandant of Auschwitz to Birkenau the second of the camp's the one where the gas chambers and crematoria were constructed the killing site the largest killing site the world has ever seen all the men I mentioned are pictured together in one of the most striking images from this album the group of some 70 SS men sing along together accompanied by an accordion esteems to sway to the music in the front row are arrayed the leaders of Auschwitz kal hooker is here again prominent in the front row on the far left in front of the wooden railing yes you see him right in the center of the image here immediately to the right of to our right if you like of hooker but behind the rail is Otto Moll he's standing a little bit further back he's the supervisor of the gas chambers Otto mole oversaw the people arriving at Auschwitz Birkenau from the time that they got off the trains until the time that they entered the gas chambers he welcomed and reassured them before assuring them to their deaths Otto Mull was one of the cruelest and most vicious of the guards at times he threw living people into the flames where the bodies were cremated were used human beings as target practice shooting from a distance to test his aim leaning casually alongside hooker elbow resting upon the wooden railing is the commandant of Auschwitz one Richard buyer and next to him in the center of the front row arms folded Rudolf Hoess just behind hearse stands that new Commandant of Auschwitz Birkenau Josef Kramer a little further along the smiling figure of dr. Josef Mengele who sent thousands to the gas chambers but who is even more notorious for the horrific medical experiments he performed on prisoners especially twins who he selected at the ramp what could have prepared these men for their positions our outfits where do you recruit men from to do these kinds of jobs what's on their CV well Carl hooker was a 32 year old family man with a wife and two young children formerly a junior bank official he by this time had become one of the organizers of mass murder before the wall Richard buyer and I said was the new commandant of Auschwitz one he was a skilled confectioner he made sweets and other delicacies Josef Kramer the new commandant of the death camp Auschwitz Birkenau was a middle-class boy from Munich he became an accountant now he was the commandant of the largest killing center the world had ever seen Mengele was an anthropologist and medical doctor he performed obscene medical experiments on Jewish in Roma children and was known to the prisoners by the Yiddish phrase my larcomar vet the angel of death a bank clerk a sweet maker an accountant a doctor the banality of their former jobs appears a shocking contrast with the killers they became but then would be a normal career preparation for outfits comparing the Lili Jacob and the hooker albums commentators have been struck by how it was possible that the same men seemingly inhabited these two separate worlds by how easily they moved from the mass murder in the inferno BIRT Birkenau to relaxing and singing and sunbathing in the beautiful surroundings of solar data but I think we should think that contrasts in a slightly different way the images appear strikingly different only when we again make the mistake that Sontag warned us of of atomizing the past in two separate and isolated moments when we neglect her warning and fail to see how apparently separate moments actually interrelate how each functioned as part of the same historical process we need then to look beyond the frozen moments of the photographs of the ramp of Birkenau and the SS retreat at solar heater to understand that the two worlds we think we see were in fact integral parts of the same genocide or process we approach this past with an understanding of course of genocide as an act of utter destruction that's our experience as our perspective that's our worldview but we grasped the significance of the hooker album only if we understand that for the perpetrators genocide is always an act of creation today our eyes are directed far more at the sight of Auschwitz rather than at Sola hotter the new exhibition that we're bringing here is called al shreds right not solid utter millions of visitors travel to the former concentration camp and death camp every year to try to understand more about the Holocaust no one visits the site of the former SS retreat nearby but for the Nazis I would suggest that al shrits Birkenau was actually of minor significant the place that we focus on the place that we visit didn't matter too much to them the death camps were not a goal in and of themselves they were the means to achieve their utopian vision a world without Jews the images of solar hota these images represent that vision from nineteen forty to forty four some fifty thousand non-jewish poles were expelled from jvh County the region in Polish Silesia which contained both Birkenau and solar hota farms villages whole towns were emptied of their inhabitants to make way for the settlement of some four thousand ethnic Germans who were brought home to the Reich from Romania and the Soviet Union in the east the expulsion of the poles was brutal families dispossessed at gunpoint sent for forced labor in Germany or dumped in their thousands into occupied lands of the general government to the east with no homes and no way of supporting themselves Jews too had lived in the Jewish region since the Middle Ages now they also were cleansed from this land forced first into the ghetto so slavich then later to the camp the death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau where almost all were murdered through the expulsion of the poles and the mass murder of the Jews this entire region was being emptied of what the Germans called Untermenschen the sub humans to create a so-called purified living space for the Germanic people who were settled there these horrors I would argue were made possible for the perpetrators who committed these crimes by the higher cause that they believed it achieved the world inhabited at retreats such as solar hotter Birkenau and solar hurt are then were inextricably linked for it was Birkenau that created the ideal of solar hotter and it was solar heater that gave the murder meaning and justification it was emblematic of that new world that the Nazis were creating and as the killer's relaxed and sang and played together they created an illusion that what they were doing was right and necessary in their camaraderie they felt bound together in a common mission and in the scenic retreat of their Lodge by the river they made the ugliness of Birkenau beautiful to themselves when we look beyond the frozen moments the real meaning of these photographs becomes revealed Birkenau created solid Herta a world without Jews and solar heater made Birkenau possible thank you [Applause] sure there's time for any comments questions yes please welcome around with the mic I'm sorry I came in late I am a childís of a survivor of Auschwitz who was one of the female co-conspirators that blew up the crematorium at Auschwitz on October 7th 1944 mm-hmm and I was just wondering whether there were any photographs of that event thank you for the question and the story that you mentioned is one of the most remarkable and powerful of this history so thank you for for sharing it yes in even in the ghettos and in the death camps there were times when Jewish people organized and resisted and fought back even when the possibility of any kind of success of course was totally lost I mean it wasn't that they were realistically trying to survive but they were perhaps choosing the manner of their own deaths and as you say even in Birkenau even in Auschwitz that happened no there are no photographs of that having very few photographs of Birkenau remain I mean I say very few very few of the the only photographs that we have of the destruction of the killing process itself that contained in that one photograph album some two hundred photographs the photographer's in the in their camp photographic Department as I said did photograph all prisoners were faith were made to photograph other prisoners as mug shot so they're huge numbers of those mug shots which you'll have seen as well there were photographs of the construction of the camp and other formal occasions other aspects there are also of course aerial photographs of the camp taken by the Allies who flew over in summer of 1940 for so if a different perspective a different viewpoint and there are also photographs remarkable photographs for of the mony that were taken by the Sonderkommando themselves from inside the area of the gas chamber but not inside the gas chamber itself by the crematoria buildings from inside those buildings taken of the view outside of course they risk their lives to take those photos so a camera that was smuggled in and one roll of film was smuggled outside these four photographs were taken and they're radically different in their style in their in the way they which they depict this because of course these people are doing this clandestine me and their great risk sometimes unfortunately those photographs are displayed cropped so that you kind of your eye gets drawn to the kind of key detail but actually part of the detail should be the things we should which we wouldn't normally frame in a photograph like the doorway for instance because it shows the danger that they were facing there's even one of the four photographs often referred to as the black photo which is a sort of failed photograph if you like it doesn't capture anything perhaps some trees you know it's black and white but maybe the branches of trees against the whited out sky it doesn't show anything and yet it shows everything because it's it's maybe a more adequate representation of the horror and the danger and the fear that these men were feeling then a beautifully framed carefully composed photo so these different photographs again depending on how we read and depending how we look at them can reveal these radically different kinds of images of the same place at the same time one summer really in 1944 but regrettably no photographs of the event you're describing what we do have our documents that were buried by the zonda commander in the hope the hope that maybe one day they would be found Zellman Rudovsky one of the Sonderkommando and and some others as well wrote documents and buried them in an aluminium flask and they write in a deer finder writing to us writing two generations afterwards search everywhere because there are documents like this and others that we have the weeders under commander he says have hidden here they're buried in the ashes of Auschwitz yeah in the in the soil of Auschwitz with the ashes of the people who'd been cremated he writes that they'd even sown deliberately taken human teeth and spread them around so they've been the traces of the dead could be found now one of the things that he writes about also is the planned revolt so we know about the refer he was involved in the revolt himself as well and he he perished none of those that were part of the Auschwitz uprising survived the uprising yourself your family story is remarkable in there thank you the other thoughts or comments questions yes please it's interesting how you talk about how these had to be done in such a clandestine way like I remember reading about the Cobb no Diaries how those were buried and found after the war and when the exhibit here of the Lodz ghetto the photographer yeah again as you said it great risk he the notes were that he hid in a shed for like six hours to take these photographs through a slat which was amazing so we know that it was documented so we I was just making these comparisons thinking other exhibits as and they were related to what you just present AB C is very powerful and I think he's one of the things we have to work hard in the field of Holocaust Studies and remembrance and education and memorials exhibition building that although the vast majority of the evidence that we have photographic and documentary comes from the perpetrators that we work hard to not only represent that past with their viewpoint and these sorts of stories these kinds of evidence are precious for that that that we have to make sure that we restore something of the agency of the victims that this is not six million people that were murdered but one person who was killed again and again and another person and another six million times and each of those people were responding to an unfolding genocide usually with very little knowledge or understanding of what was going on with very limited resources with very small options but as best they could and these images these these stories and those that you mentioned of people that chose to document what they could of their experiences is brought into even more significance I think when we do think of the words of the perpetrators themselves such as Heinrich Himmler him there in 1943 gave a speech to SS men in Posen Poznan congratulating them on the work that they were doing he said you know for one moment we will speak about these events know that he says we should not talk about elsewhere could because he said other people won't understand yeah they they kind of agree with it he says but they don't want to know about it but he here with us he says those men who have seen they know what it's like to see a hundred or five hundred bodies on the ground he says we'll speak about it and he congratulates them for it he tells them that they have made themselves hard and remained fundamentally decent men but he also says this is a page of glory in our history that must never be written now this idea about keeping it secret it's ironic in a way we have the recording of him saying yet he liked to be recorded so we actually have him saying those words but you know he said this will never be written and yet others were writing that history at the moment that he was giving that speech at the time in which people were already under from his order going through the killing fields of the of Eastern Europe digging up mass graves and burning the bodies to hide the traces of the evidence at that same moment people in the ghettos in the camps in hiding were recording what they could and we do have some fragments of their memories too thank you thank you yes new film which I'm hoping to see myself tomorrow about the Ringelblum a archive in Warsaw all right absolutely so does someone want to pass you the microphone because I think the things that you're saying should be captured as well sorry to interrupt you but would you mind just seeing those last words yes yes I was saying that I was very taken by what you said about what we as an audience bring woman to the to what looking at a photographs could clearly what I bring to what I see is very different than the rest of the audience who were not children of survivors as when I was watching who will write our history my mother having survived the Warsaw Ghetto knowing ringing in bloom and being one of the upright you know a part of the uprising I had a feisty mom but you know clearly what I brought to watching that was I was searching for her in what I was seeing and that's clearly different than an audience you know I was looking for my grandfather and my relatives and trying to see oh that kind of looks like her was that her so that also in a way distracted me from you know the film but we all bring something different and I was very I'm very mindful of what you just said because that's part of the memory of the Holocaust is keeping it alive for different people thank you it's very powerful nothing you're absolutely right it's one of the things we should remember whenever we see a new representation of the past as well of course that it's not a window on the past it's not the past as it was it is the way it's been reinterpreted by the person who produces that so the wonderful exhibition that you have here which will okay be replaced by this new exhibition outfits is another interpretation of that pass but the thing which we would hope all visitors would bear in mind that for better or worse it's the viewpoint of the curators in a wonderful team of colleagues that that work very hard on that but it's not the final word right it's only one version one interpretation the selection that we were able to me and it's the same for any film that you watch or any book that you read or any talk that you come to here it's not the past as it was it's always reflecting the interest of positionality the perspective of the person who has constructed that version and it's those many truths which i think is so valuable and I hope young people also in their education learn to weigh those different truth claims against each other and have some sense of how to use the evidence it's why I'm been looking so closely at these photographs not just to see them as a window in the past a depiction an illustration of the past but how do we read them as evidence how do we discern meaning and what do we find inside them so thank you yes please so I have two questions that's okay so first of all we're talking about the photograph of Lilly's brother why do you think is this one used so much in different exhibitions and works regarding the Holocaust and my second question would be what kind of educational potential do you see in the Auschwitz album and in the hook-up so the app why is the album use so much because it's is the only source I'm sorry photograph of her brother oh yes the one of her brother I think you know I alluded to it in the in the talk I think I'm a number of reasons I mean it's I think there's that personal connection with Lily herself you know that's something which is staggering and striking to us the poignancy of that that she's looking back on the faces of her murdered brothers there's something in that that I think we hold on to the fact that they're children of course conveys innocence and loss you know 90% of all Jewish children in occupied Europe were murdered during the Holocaust 90 percent so they represent something of this right so a number of reasons but also I think in my mind I mean my interpretation of that is also because it's an easy way for the curator or the publisher or the documentarian to engage their audience something we know that people will relate to and so that was my critique of that use in a sense was not that we shouldn't use that photograph but we should work harder to see the humanity of those there are sort of less like ourselves so there's obviously sympathetic in the sense that because the way they've been photographed by the Nazis and the educational potential is enormous and rich huge it depends what question you're asking education is of course not really about the accumulation of facts and details it's about interpretation and meaning making so I think one of the things in my work in terms of education is not to impose meaning on the past from my point of view it's not about telling young people or adults or anyone what this means but working together to struggle to understand and discern meaning I think that the these are give us opportunities to open a discussion some of you have already been contributing your thoughts your comments and what you will end up with any group with any group of students or adults are often meanings or comments or memories or recollections that are far more profound than the ones you come with yourself so it's that exchange that dialog that development of critical thinking where there is an educational purpose beyond that of course why study or learn about the Holocaust at all if that's what you mean in terms of the educational value and if you don't I'm going to answer it anyway because I think it's also important if you are interested at all in how it becomes possible that people murder their neighbors you know in there in huge numbers how am i genocide occurs in the world if you have any sense that this is important and you are hoping in some way to strengthen efforts towards genocide prevention the first starting point has to be trying to understand what genocide was and is and how and why those things happen what kinds of warning signs there may be what kinds of moments could be possible for intervention these things are important right to me anyway and if you think that's important then it makes sense from my perspective to begin with the Holocaust not to end with it but to begin because the Holocaust is by far the most extensively documented the most intensively researched and the best understood example of genocide in human history it should lead us to study others in far more depth also if we want to understand patterns and understand how these things happen I think the image of those two boys can be meaningful in reminding us of what the the import of genocide should be for us today thank you for your attention and coming out on this freezing night and I hope you have a safe journey home and not too far to go in the cold thank you

Channel: Museum of Jewish Heritage

Views: 6,631

Rating: 4.6404495 out of 5

Keywords: Auschwitz, Images of Auschwitz, Paul Salmons, Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York's Holocaust Museum, #StoriesSurvive, Auschwitz Album, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, #WeRemember

Id: BRxfJpuTCT4

Length: 84min 53sec (5093 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019