Horror in sharp focus
The Auschwitz Photographer Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis Doubleday, £14.99
The inmates of Auschwitz death camp were required to sit for a photograph as the
Germans liked to ensure they were “murdering the right person”.
The camp photographer was Wilhelm Brasse, a 20-year-old German-Pole incarcerated because he refused to fight for the Nazis. In the dark room of Block 26, Brasse took monochrome stills on Agfa film of tens of thousands of Jews, partisans, “asocials”, Romani – all deemed an enemy of the Reich.
So impressed were Brasse’s SS bosses by his camera work that they asked him to take their studio portrait in postcard format, to be sent home to the family.
How mundane! For this favour, Brasse received contraband gifts, such as a loaf of black bread or a sausage. Brasse was a good man so he shared the life-saving food with his assistants.
By his own admission, this same good man closed his mind to the horrors of camp life. Even so, reality kept breaking in. A prisoner, whose job was to feed the camp’s ovens with the corpses of the gassed, showed Brasse an atrocity beyond even the experience of the crematoria staff: a prisoner had been skinned so his tattooed back could be made into a book-binding for an SS officer – human leather.
Brasse was incarcerated in Auschwitz in 1940. The insanity whirligigged. One day Brasse discovered his uncle, who had taught him the photography on which his own life now depended, among the victims. Another day, Brasse was assigned photography of “a special nature”, the recording of Dr Josef Mengele’s experiments on women, twins and dwarves to “perfect” German blood. Brasse captured the midnight of the 20th century.
As the terrible experiences accumulated, Brasse’s conscience got the better of him. He stopped hiding in the dark room and joined the camp’s resistance. As Soviet troops advanced to liberate Auschwitz and the SS fled, Brasse ignored their orders to destroy his photographs “because the world must know”.
Sometimes heroism is banal, it is saying “No”.
Bresse survived Auschwitz but could not bear to pick up a camera again. He’d seen too much through a Leica’s lens.
This book is all close up and could do with more of a contextualising view of the Holocaust. But it is important, because the world must know.