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July 30, 2004
The vision of a photographer
Henry Ries helped define the public perception of postwar Europe.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
On May 24, the world lost one of its most noted photographers.
Henry Ries, whose images of postwar Europe helped the world assimilate
the human devastation of the time, died in New York. Some of his
photographs are on display now at the Vancouver Holocaust Education
Centre.
Ries's life was intrinsically affected by his Berlin origins. The
title of his memoirs, Ich war ein Berliner (I was a Berliner),
slyly echoed John F. Kennedy's more optimistic declaration. Fleeing
Germany in the early Nazi years, Ries was forced to leave the United
States and return to Germany due to American immigration bureaucracy.
He did return to New York before Europe was completely enflamed,
but his heart and his eye were drawn inescapably back to his place
of origin. In 1945, he joined an office of the U.S. government in
Germany, working as a translator on such documents as Hitler's will
and documentation of the human experimentation in concentration
camps. He photographed parts of the proceedings at the Nuremberg
trials and became the New York Times photographer in Western
Europe. As such, he helped define in the American and broader imagination
the challenges faced by Europe as a continent and the victims of
Nazism as individuals.
The series of photographs on display at the Vancouver Holocaust
Education Centre, until Sept. 15, focuses on the remarkable story
of Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, and the aftermath of the fateful
voyage of the Haganah ship Exodus.
Ries's photographs of the residents at the hospital are emblematic
of the human reconstruction taking place after the war. While some
surviviors were forced into displaced persons camps on the sites
of former concentration camps, the Rothschild Hospital had a relatively
kinder provenance. Built in 1872 through the philanthropy of the
Rothschild family to serve the Jewish population of Vienna, it was
one of the foremost hospitals in Austria and, remarkably, was allowed
to continue functioning long after other all other Jewish institutions
had been shut down. Eventually, in 1942, it was usurped for use
as an SS army hospital. After the war, it was reconstituted and
served as both medical facility and DP camp. Equipped to handle
600 patients at a time, the Rothschild Hospital saw an estimated
250,000 Jewish refugees pass through its doors between 1945 and
1951, when most European DP camps finally closed.
Ries's photographs are a testament to the trauma and resilience
of the Rothschild Hospital's patients and, by extension, the experience
of the hundreds of thousands of survivors of Nazi horror.
The atmosphere in the photographs ranges from optimistic to gloomy.
In one, hospital laundry is left out to dry in a wide courtyard
between institutional buildings while a cluster of people linger
under grey skies. In another, quarter-loaves of bread and a handful
of dates are distributed to relatively healthy looking residents.
A photo of a group of young men watching a performance captures
the expressive faces and, though the expectation may be directed
at something as simple as a stage show, it seems to capture the
remarkable resilience of the survivors, who Ries immortalizes enthusiastically
looking forward.
Elsewhere, apprentice tailors learn their trade on sewing machines
in the workshop at the hospital and a Chassid in a fur hat davens
with a look of deep concentration in the hospital's synagogue, which
was furnished with religious materials from the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee.
In one of the simplest but most striking tableaux in the series,
a mother nurses an infant. As a photograph, it wouldn't have such
poignancy viewed out of context. But knowing as the photographer
did – and the viewer does – that the mother is one of
the remnants of European Jewry, that the infant is among the first
bright blooms in a desolated, post-Shoah world, this small, most
basic of human acts, has perhaps never seemed more monumental.
The Rothschild Hospital was the recipient not only of Nazism's victims
but, in 1946, began to receive the survivors of the shocking Kielce
pogrom in Poland. On July 4, 1946, police, soldiers and ordinary
citizens of the town of Kielce engaged in a medieval-style attack
on the Jews of the town, based on the apparently falsified account
of a boy who said he'd been kidnapped by a local Jewish man. At
least 40 Jews were killed in the violence, the injured transfered
to Vienna's Rothschild Hospital. The hopes Jews had for a peaceful
existence in postwar Poland was dealt a disastrous blow. Ries's
photographs show Kielce refugees arriving at the hospital.
All was clearly not dismal for the survivors and attempts were made
to provide recreational outlets, as evidenced by one of the pictures,
in which can be seen a poster, in English, declaring (sic): "Hey
fellas. We'd like some Hill billy band immediately. We have a banjo
mandolin and guitare. So if you can play please let us know."
A second series of photographs by Ries is of the fated passengers
on the ship Exodus. The Exodus was a decommissioned American warship,
bought by the Haganah for $60,000 and turned into a crude ocean-going
passenger ship. Boarding at Marseille, France, on July 10, 1947,
4,515 Jewish refugees, most recently discharged from Europe's displaced
persons camps, set out for Palestine. Under the British mandate
at the time, immigration was closely regulated but effectively banned.
As soon as it left French waters, the Exodus was closely trailed
by a British destroyer. As it neared the coast of Palestine, the
British ship rammed the Exodus and British personnel boarded the
refugees' ship. Refusing to give up without a fight, the Haganah
fighters and refugees engaged the British. Two Jews were killed
and 30 wounded. The Exodus was towed to Haifa and her passengers
placed on ships to return them to France, where they remained in
the holds, amid a stifling heat wave, for 24 days.
After Israeli independence, some of the refugees were able to make
aliyah. Ries captures the stunning images of the refugees' return
to Europe and the photographs have an alarming familiarity to them.
The DP camps to which the refugees were sent look much like the
concentration camps many of the refugees had survived. Before the
Exodus passengers arrive at the camp, a train ride away from the
sea, soldiers are seen lining the rail tracks awaiting their delivery.
Upon arrival, the passengers are divided, with the injured and ill
being loaded onto covered trucks to be taken for medical attention.
Ries photographed other passengers carrying rolled blankets and
bags, the meagre possessions they had carried back and forth across
the Mediterranean. The photographer captures the dejected faces
of three young men as they depart the train, but Ries shoots them
from behind a chain-link fence, accentuating the sense of imprisonment.
Elsewhere, three girls stare out from behind barbed wire, two of
them holding onto the fence wires with their hands.
In 1955, Ries opened his own studio in New York and, in addition
to burnishing his reputation as a leading photojournalist, was the
author of eight books.
Pat Johnson is a Vancouver journalist and commentator.
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