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April 21, 2006
Very moving pictures
Photos found at Auschwitz capture lost worlds.
PAT JOHNSON
The Last Album: Eyes from the
Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau
By Ann Weiss
The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 2005. 232 pages. $40
When the Nazis meticulously went through the belongings of their
Jewish and other victims, they were under strict orders to destroy
every personal photograph brought by concentration camp arrivals.
But the photos carried by one transport to Ausch-witz-Birkenau in
1943 escaped destruction and, in 1986, Ann Weiss entered a room
in the Aushchwitz museum and found the 2,400 photographs.
Weiss, a child of survivors and a Pennsylvania writer, created this
monument, The Last Album, which is tempting to dub a "coffee
table" book, using 400 of those photos, enhanced with personal
stories behind many of the photos.
Weiss begins with a testament to the one million children killed
in the Holocaust: pictures of parents proudly holding babies, dressed
up for an outing in the pram, clutching a favorite doll, naked on
fur rugs, playing in the water at the aqueduct, crowded into class
pictures.
Like so many of their genre, these photos are poignant because of
the historical knowledge the observer has – which the subjects
of the photos did not. Snaps of ordinary acts take on significance
in light of our knowledge that the people in the photos likely did
not survive a few years beyond the moment the image was captured.
In the book, Zionist activists learn farming techniques in Polish
fields, men and women play grand pianos or stand proudly outside
the family business, many of which were headed by Jewish women.
Glamour shots mingle with kooky setups, vacation snaps, city life
and country sports. A toddler laughs at his reflection in the mirror.
The pictures, like their owners, were not destined to survive, though
these few remarkably did.
In his introduction to the book, James E. Young writes, "Not
only were the victims to be expunged from both history and memory,
but in their methodical destruction of the Jews, the Nazis took
great pains to expunge all traces of their crimes as well. By consuming
all traces of its victims, the killing process would thus consume
all memory of itself, the Nazis hoped."
Young says that the floor-to-ceiling piles of prosthetic limbs,
eyeglasses, toothbrushes, suitcases and shorn hair that visitors
recall most vividly from their trips to the museum at Auschwitz
beg the question: "What precisely do these artifacts teach
us about the history of the people who once animated them? Beyond
affect, what does our knowledge of these objects – a bent spoon,
children's shoes, crusty old striped uniforms – have to do
with our knowledge of historical events? In a perversely ironic
twist, these artifacts – collected as evidence of the crimes
– were forcing us to recall the victims as the Nazis have remembered
them to us: in the collected debris of a destroyed civilization.
Armless sleeves, eyeless lenses, headless caps, footless shoes:
victims are known only by their absence, by the moment of their
destruction.
"Such a project extends the realm of Holocaust history backward,"
continues Young, "to include the rich, prewar tangle of lives
lost. It suggests that the Holocaust was not merely the sum of Jews
murdered or maimed, but the loss of all that came before as well."
Describing her project, Weiss writes: "Books are usually written
by the living. This book is different. Its principal voice comes
from the dead. But they are not dead ... yet. No ordinary photographs,
these are the personal photos brought by Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
These photos do not depict the familiar nightmare images of death;
instead we find ourselves immersed in the details of life –
ordinary moments which cease to be ordinary when viewed in the momentous
historical context of these exceptional times."
The photos arrived at Auschwitz when the Bedzin Ghetto was liquidated
and its residents deported Aug. 1-3, 1943. Weiss has succeeded in
matching a remarkable number of names and stories to the pictures,
tracking down some of the families and neighbors of those depicted
in the photos, who tell their stories, which are as unique and mundane
as the pictures themselves.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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