In the background, behind barbed wire, prisoners are seated in the light of the morning sun while waiting for the “treatment” operations of the convoy to end on the road to the Auschwitz concentration camp, in this spring 1944 . One of them puts his handkerchief on their nose to protect themselves from pestilential odors, from the cremation of the bodies. Next to it, another frankly looks at the photographer, while pulling his tongue.
This act is far from derisory. It is an act of distrust, witness to the resistance of the victims which appear on the images produced by the SS Bernhard Walter. In collaboration with his assistant Ernst Hofmann, this close close to Rudolf Höss (Commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau) carried out a series of photographs documenting the arrival of Hungarian Jews in the concentration and extermination camps in the spring of 1944.
The 197 original images, known as “Auschwitz album”, document the different stages of the process, from the descent of the trains to the selection on the ramp. First intended for an administrative goal, they are also, by their staging, a way of dehumanizing and humiliating the victims photographed. But when they are read differently, they also hide many gestures of challenge and resistance, which the exhibition reveals to us How the Nazis photographed their crimes: Auschwitz 1944freely accessible to the Shoah Memorial, in Paris, since January 23, 2025.
Photo of Lili Jacob’s album, YVA, FA268_87 n °. Free
Resistance in Nazi photographs
“In these photographs, whether women, men or children, there are lots of traces of resistance that must be successfully identified”explains in an interview with Geo Tal Bruttmann, historian and exhibition commissioner. Despite the will of Bernhard Walter and Ernst Hofmann to show their management submissive and controlled masses, these gestures come to deny the narration even that SS intended to give the events.
-The specialist thus gives the entirely found example of this woman, pulling her tongue. Others do the same on other shots. “We have all made this type of gesture, with the tongue or the fingers, to ‘rot’ an imagecontinues the specialist. This is something that we practice. And yet, here it has a completely different meaning, which must be able to see. This shows that women – and also children – had enough courage to challenge, with others SS Armed around, the one who took a picture of them. “
L’album the outchwititz: Memory it transmissions
The “Auschwitz album” is the only existing photographic testimony to the arrival of Jewish deportees in a death camp. His discovery and more recently, his rereading to reveal the smallest details, often imperceptible with uninformed eyes, would not have been possible without Lili Jacob. At 18, the young woman was interned in April 1944 at the Berehovo ghetto with her family (her parents, her five brothers, her maternal grandparents, her paternal and kindergarten aunts and their children) and deported in June 1944 to Auschwitz.
On the camp ramp, she is brutally separated from her relatives, which she will never see again. In December, she was transferred to Gross-Rosen, then in March 1945 to Dora-Nordhausen. She catches the typhus there, but survives until the release of the camp. By searching the barracks deserted by the SShundreds of kilometers from Auschwitz, she discovers an album there. It contains the prints of Bernhard Walter, on which she recognizes her family and friends waiting, without knowing it, the time for their killing.
For several years, Lili Jacob brings the album to life. But in 1980, the historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, known for his struggle for the memory of the Shoah and his commitment to justice for the victims of Nazi crimes, convinced her to donate to the Yad Vashem Memorial, in Jerusalem. It has been preserved since carefully. Today, its content goes beyond its initial role of macabre documentation and control produced by the executioners. It is an essential tool for transmission and memory, recalling that the spirit of resistance could express themselves, sometimes in discreet but powerful forms.
- How the Nazis photographed their crimes: Auschwitz 1944from January 23, 2025.????Mémorial de la Shoah, 17 rue Geoffroy L’Asnier, 75004 Paris. Free entry. For more information, it is ici.
