an exhibition deciphers the photographs at Auschwitz

Crowds of women and men disembarking from trains, waiting in line for “the selection” under the gaze of SS soldiers… We all have these images in our heads, reproduced many times in documentaries and books on the Shoah. What is less known is that they mainly come from one source: a photo album found by a deportee, Lili Jacob, upon her release in March 1945. The two hundred photos it contains form the basis of About the exhibition presented at the Shoah Memorial in Paris: “How the Nazis photographed their crimes. Auschwitz 1944.

Through patient historical research, it has been established that these images were taken at Auschwitz during the spring and summer of 1944, to document the deportation and killing of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews, planned over three months. This is a propaganda report, intended to show that despite the enormity of the operation, “everything is going well”, without haste, without violence… “We know that in reality, the arrivals of 3000 people at the same time, exhausted after a trip in a cattle car, disoriented and worried, things were not going so calmly,” comments Sophie Nagiscarde, responsible for cultural activities and who worked on this exhibition.

The historian Tal Bruttmann carried out a major study on these photos, in order to identify all the possible information on the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the arrival of the convoys of deportees. On the other hand, he researched who the photographers were and what their intention was behind the shots. These two research directions feed the two exhibition rooms. The first presents the context, explaining to what extent Auschwitz was constantly under construction between 1940 and 1945, so that more and more people were rounded up and exterminated there.

In the second room, certain images are deciphered to show the visitor how, for example, a group of “typical” rabbis are posed in order to illustrate the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Nazis. Conversely, the exhibition highlights details that escaped the executioners: among women selected for forced labor, one of them stuck her tongue out at the photographer…

The most striking is undoubtedly the juxtaposition of these carefully staged photos which conceal the horror of the situation, with the testimony of Esther Goldstein, a survivor who recognized herself in certain images with her sisters, and testifies with a lot of emotion, during the Eichmann trial in 1961.

“Cynically, the album stops at the threshold of the gas chambers: we only see groups after the selection, which are taken there” observes Sophie Nagiscarde. The exhibition ends with this brutal contrast with the truth: four poor images, taken clandestinely by deportees, show a few women undressing to enter the gas chamber and then burned corpses, in the same place.