In 2013, my wife and I took a road trip through Poland. One specific stop on our itinerary was Auschwitz, not the town, but the museum located on the site of the former concentration camp. This was a place I absolutely wanted to visit. The genocide of the Jews is part of my family’s history.
I won’t talk about the museum itself right now, that’s a subject for another conversation. But before leaving, I bought a photo album titled Auschwitz: A History in Photographs from the shop near the exit. It’s one of the few books I took with me when we moved to another country. However, for some reason, I only started to study it in detail five years later. I don’t quite know how to write about this book, but I still want to.
This book contains several essays about the history of the camp, the creation of the museum, short excerpts from the memories of former prisoners, and testimony from the former camp commandant. But the bulk of it, of course, is photographs. The last part of the book features artwork by those who survived the camp, depicting the horrifying daily life they endured and later showed to the world.
The photographs are also divided into sections: the structure of the camp (including aerial photography) and living evidence of the atrocities that were commonplace in the camp—atrocities the Nazis tried to hide at the end of the war but couldn’t.
Such material is very difficult to study. You look at a photograph—it’s just a building. But then you realize it’s a crematorium where thousands of people were killed daily! I remember the first time I saw the film Ordinary Fascism as a child. I was terrified to watch it, but I couldn’t turn off the TV. And when the footage from the concentration camps started, I felt sick.
Now I’m less easily shaken, but something else has changed. I’m now a father. I can view these horrifying testimonies with less emotion… no, not less emotion… but with a tougher shell, if that makes sense. However, every time I look at photographs of children in the concentration camps, I feel just as sick as I did back then. Because I project every child’s face onto my own children, as terrifying as that may sound. Just think about how horrifying that is. You look at a frightened or smiling child, and you know that five or ten minutes after that photo was taken, they were coldly murdered. Children are innocent beings who don’t know the cruelty of the world, who don’t expect anything bad…
It’s even hard to write about this. But after looking at these photographs, I once again understand how important it is to view such albums and visit such museums. To remember. To remember so that this never happens again. Because “our grandfathers fought” so that THIS would never happen again.
This is also why, for example, Israel regularly takes its young soldiers to Auschwitz. So they remember. So they understand WHAT they must defend and FROM WHAT.
It’s pointless to rate such books. They are simply essential to study.
