Auschwitz and the photographic record of Wilhelm Brasse

January 27th was the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination and concentration camp  Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet Red Army troops in 1945.

Over 1.5 million people died in Auschwitz, most of them Jewish men, women and children.

The photographs of Wilhelm Brasse are one of the most haunting and shocking photographic records of the Holocaust.

Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish professional photographer who was a prisoner at Auschwitz, who was forced to photograph thousands of inmates for Nazi identity records, as well as documenting medical experimentation on the prisoners. Prior to the war Brasse was a photographer.

Brasse estimates that in the years he was a camp photographer he took between 40,000 and 50,000 images of inmates and German officers and staff between 1940-1945. 

Being a camp photographer saved Brasse's life. He was treated better than other prisoners and received better meals.

As the Russian army drew closer to Auschwitz in 1945 Brasse was ordered to destroy the images. He refused. With the help of another inmate Brasse manged to bury the tens of thousands of picture negatives in the camp’s ground. They were recovered later.

Although only a proportion of the images survived, Brasse's work remains one of the few surviving photographic records of Auschwitz.

Brasse was one of 20,000 inmates who managed to survive. He was moved to another concentration camp in Austria where he was liberated by American forces in May 1945.

After the war, Brasse lived  just a few miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was so traumatized and haunted by the "ghosts" of the photographs of his subjects that he was unable to to resume work as a portrait photographer and ultimately established a sausage casing business.

Brasse would never take another photograph.

Brasse had two children and five grandchildren, and lived with his wife until he died in 2012 aged 94.

Articles about Wilhelm Brasse are here, here, here, here and here.

Lilly Brett and the contemporary resonance of the Holocaust

Leaving You
Lilly Brett

It has taken me
a long time to know
that it was your war
not mine

that I wasn’t
in Auschwitz
myself

that I have never seen
the Lodz Ghetto

or Stuthof
or a cattle wagon
or a selection queue
I thought
I knew
Nazis

I thought
I had lived
with fear

with
ration cards
with work permits

I thought I knew
what bodies gnawed by rats
looked like

and how
the mattresses
smelt

and what
it felt like
to fill your lungs

with
smoke
from flesh

to
live
with death

I have had
trouble
Mother
leaving you.

Lily Brett is an award-winning German- born, Australian novelist, essayist and poet who has lived in New York City since 1988. She began writing profiles of rock musicians in the 1960s for the Australian music magazine Go Set. Brett has published seven volumes of poetry, three collections of essays and six novels.

Brett is recognised as a distinguished Jewish poet of the Holocaust, along with poets like Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Primo Levi, Hayim Gouri, and Jerzy Ficowski.

Brett was the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents survived six years in Polish ghettos before being transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp where they were separated. At the war's conclusion, they searched for six months to find each other. Brett's parents lost their whole family in the Holocaust-brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts.

Lilly Brett was born in a displaced persons' camp in Germany in 1946 and emigrated to Melbourne in 1948, aged two.

Brett is currently in Australia to deliver the 2016 Yom Hashoah Communal Commemoration lecture for the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies to honour Holocaust survivors who migrated to Australia.

In a recent interview she expressed concern about the ways that contemporary politicians are exploiting the politics of hate and demonization for political gain, likening it to tactics used by the Nazis:

"...racism is dangerous. That bigotry is dangerous. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about Jews or anyone else, we cannot allow bigotry. And hatred of other people has become acceptable again. And it is becoming acceptable. Look at Donald Trump. The way he talks about Mexicans, and Muslims. His tactics are the same as any despot in history. It’s the politics of hate. That’s how people operated in the Nazi era, and when politicians do that it makes other people think it is acceptable.
“I have heard Australians — people I like enormously — talk about asylum-seekers in a way that makes me want to cry because we were refugees. And if you look at any community that has taken refugees in, they have enriched those communities."

A conversation between Richard Fidler and Lilly Brett on the ABC program Conversations with Richard Fidler is here.

Paul Celan: What is remembered and what is known

"Reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won"

Paul Celan

"A poem can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the–not always hopeful–belief that, somewhere and sometime, it could wash up on land.”
Paul Celan

Paul Celan, 
A LEAF, treeless for Bertolt Brecht:
(trans by Michael Hamburger)

"What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime
because it includes
so much made explicit?'

To a Brother in Asia
Paul Celan

the self- transfigured
guns
travel skyward,

ten
bombers yawn, 

a rapid fire blossoms
just surely as peace,

a handful of rice
dies away as your friend.

Amanda Joy's generous gift of the book Romanian Poems by Paul Celan translated by Nina Cassian has sent me searching deeper into the life and work of Paul Celan.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian born German speaking poet and translator, considered one of the great German language poets, along with Rainer Marie Rilke. 

Born Paul Antschel- Paul Celan was the pseudonym he wrote under- he was born into a German speaking Jewish family in Czenowitz, Bukovina in Romania. He began writing poetry as  a teenager, when he was active in Jewish socialist organisations. In 1938, after finishing school he went to Paris to study medicine but because of Jewish quotas in Universities, he returned to Romania before the outbreak of war.

During WW2 he was forced into the Romanian ghetto where he translated Shakespeare and continued to write poetry. In 1942, the Nazis  rounded up ghetto inhabitants and sent them to concentration camps. His parents were deported to a concentration camp where his mother was shot and his father most likely died of typhus. Celan worked in a Nazi labor camp for 18 months before escaping when the Red Army advanced into Romania. An uncle died in Birkenau Concentration camp.

After the war he lived in Bucharest between 1945-47 and fled to Vienna after the Russian occupation of Romania and establishment of the Communist regime. His first collection of poetry was published in Vienna. He moved to Paris in 1948, where he lived until his death. He became a French citizen in 1955.

His poetry began to gain recognition after 1952. Celan's early pre-war poetry was lyrical and complex, however  he shifted dramatically in the post war years embracing more sober, factual and practical language.

Celan is best known for his post war poem Death Fugue, a poem set in a the death camp. 

Black milk of morning

we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night 

we drink and drink

we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

 There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who

writes

when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden

hair Margareta

he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start

flashing he whistles his

 dogs to draw near

whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of

sand

he commands us to play for the dance

extract from Death Fugue by Paul Celan 

© 2005 by Paul Celan and Jerome Rothenberg

His poetry speaks of the tyranny and horror of the war and postwar years. While much of his poetry speaks profoundly of the Holocaust and the death of his parents and family members, Celan was not just a Holocaust poet.

Celan wrote poetry in German, registering in their own language the horror the Nazi's created. Of language after Auschwitz, Celan wrote:

"Only one thing remained readable close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could re-surface 'enriched' by it all."

Celan took his own life in April 1970 in the Seine River in Paris.

John McGregor who produced an ABC radio feature on Paul Celan wrote of  Paul Celan's poetry:

'But the surprise, the discovery, was reading the poetry of Paul Celan. It was a shattering experience, its impact upon me difficult to encompass in a bland sentence or two. Celan's vision is at once one of immense grief - the grief of exile, of bearing witness to the Holocaust, of facing history and personal loss in the one moment - and also a vision of what can only be called 'a terrible beauty'. Reading his work I found myself frequently breathless, at other times in tears, or astounded by the beauty he conveyed in startling images, suffused through with arcane and complex allusions."

Holocaust Poetry: 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak by Jerzy Ficowski

Jerzy Ficowski's poem 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak can be found in Hilda Schiff's book Holocaust Poetry.

The poem is an elegy to the final act of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish pediatrician, educator, author who established and ran orphanages in Warsaw for 30 years.

As the principal for children houses (orphanages), a doctor, a publisher of a children's newspaper, as well as an author and expert witness in court, Korczak fought for a better life for children.

When the Nazis created the Warsaw ghetto in 1939, the orphanage was inside the ghetto walls. Korczak lived with the children and his staff under inhumane conditions and although he was offered the chance to escape Korczak refused, choosing to stay with the children.

On August 5th 1942 the entire orphanage, including children and staff, with a thousand others from the ghetto, were marched to the railroad marshaling yard, to be transported east to the Treblinka Concentration Camp. 

 A person in the crowd witnessed the extraordinary drama and lived to describe it (the quotes are taken from an article about Korczak on the website of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota):

"Forced into tight formation, body against body, driven by guards wielding whips on all sides, the solid mass of humanity was forced to run toward the train platform. Suddenly the Commandant ordered the Secret Police to pull back . ...

"At the head of a thin line was Korczak! No, how could it be? The scene I shall never forget. In contrast to the mass of humanity being driven like animals to slaughter, there appeared a group of children marching together in formation. They were the orphanage children walking four abreast in a line behind Korczak. His eyes were lifted to heaven. Even the military personnel stood still and saluted. When the Germans saw Korczak, they asked, `Who is that man?' "

Another survivor, who succeeded in fleeing from the railroad platform, remembered the scene as Korczak and the children were put into the cattle cars.

"These children did not cry, these innocent little beings did not even weep. Like sick sparrows they snuggled up to their teacher, their caregiver, their father and their brother Janusz Korczak, that he might protect them with his weak, emaciated body . ..."

The train took them all to the death camp at Treblinka where Korczak, his staff and the children all perished in the gas chambers.

5.8.1942  IN MEMORY OF JANUSZ KORCZAK

What did the Old Doctor do

in the cattle wagon

bound for Treblinka on the fifth of August

over the few hours of the bloodstream

over the dirty river of time

I do not know

what did Charon of his own free will

the ferryman without an oar do

did he give out to the children

what remained of gasping breath

and leave for himself

only frost down the spine

I do not know

did he lie to them for instance

in small

numbing doses

groom the sweaty little heads

for the scurrying lice of fear

I do not know

yet for all that yet later yet here

in Treblinka

all their terror all the tears

were against him

oh it was only now

just so many minutes say a lifetime

whether a little or a lot

I was not there I do not know

suddenly the Old Doctor saw

the children had grown

as old as he was

older and older

that was how fast they had to go grey as ash

Jerzy Ficowski

(translated by Keith Bosley) 
  

The collected works of Primo Levi: The power of 'ordinary witness'

'Some prayed, some drank to excess, others became intoxicated by a final unseemly lust. But the mothers stayed up to prepare food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out to dry in the wind. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the pillows, and the hundred other small things that mothers remember and children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not feed him today?'

 Primo Levi, writing about the last night of Jewish prisoners in Italy before being deported to Auschwitz, from If This is a Man

 

For those influenced by the writing and life of Primo Levi comes news that a new three edition 14 book The Collected Works of Primo Levi has been published in the Penguin Classic series, with an introduction by Toni Morrison.

The new book contains all Levis's best known books, as well as as non-fiction work not previously published in English.

 

Primo Levi is best known for his harrowing account of survival and suffering in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, as well as The Periodic Table, 21 stories in which Levi connects aspect of his life in pre- and post-war Italy to an element from the periodic table and The Drowned and The Saved.

In an extract from her introduction to the book, published in the Guardian, Toni Morrison writes:
 

The Complete Works of Primo Levi is far more than a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate and re-examine historical and contemporary plagues of systematic necrology; it becomes a brilliant deconstruction of malign forces. The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing. For a number of reasons, his works are singular amid the wealth of Holocaust literature.

As an admirer and reader of Levi's poetry, I was interested to read Morrison's claim that:

 

'Melancholy and sorrow reside more in the poetry than in his prose'

 

Tony Judt argues something similar in his magnificent essay The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi (in his 2008 book of essays Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century) arguing that Levi was drawn to pessimism, particularly towards the end of his life, in the face of the revival of revisionism around the Holocaust and the exploitation of human suffering  in movies and popular culture.
 

Reviews of the book and essays in honor of Primo Levi are here, here and  here

Songs of Renown: Paul Robeson, Hirsh Glik and the Hymn of the Jewish Partisans

The song Zog Nit Keynmol (in Yiddish), also known under various titles- the Hymn of the Jewish Partisans, the Partisans Song or the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto- was written in 1943 by Hirsh Glik, who was a young Jewish poet, resistance fighter and inmate of the Warsaw Ghetto. 

More about Hirsh Glik is here on the website Music and the Holocaust.

The song was adopted by Jewish partisans and resistance fighters and was a symbol of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. The song was often sung by people in concentration camps.

The song was a regular concert performance by Paul Robeson who sang the song in Yiddish and English.

Paul Robeson sang the song in a Moscow concert in 1949 during the height of Stalin's anti-Jewish purge. It was his protest against Soviet persecution of Jews.  In that concert, Robeson spoke in support of Jewish writers and actors in Russia and his friendship with Jews who had perished in Stalin's purges.

Here is how the concert is described on the website of the  Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation:

Four years after the fall of Hitler, the tune would be used as a form of resistance against another 20th century tyrant. Paul Robeson traveled to Moscow in June of 1949 to give a performance to an audience that included many Communist Party elites, as well as what little remained of the Jewish intelligentsia after Stalin's purges. At the end of the concert, Robeson stunned the audience with a surprise rendition of the Partisan Hymn. His introductory remarks contained references to the Yiddish language, the deep and enduring cultural ties between the US and Russian Jewish communities, as well as to leading Jewish intellectuals who had been "disappeared" by the regime. 

The remarks, the spontaneous translation of the song to the shocked audience, and thunderous applause that followed were cut from the recording by Stalin's censors, but the chaos is evident in the mixture of applause and jeers that follows the actual performance.

Here is a heavily censored live version of Robeson's performance from that 1949 concert:

The following comments are from Paul Robeson's son Paul Robeson Jr's biography of his father:

... One could hear a pin drop during my father remarks about the deep and enduring cultural ties between the Jewish communities of the Soviet Union and the United States, about the common tradition of the great Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem, and about the continued vitality of the Yiddish language. Finally he announced that he would sing a song of the Jewish partisans who fought to the death against their Fascist oppressors in the Warsaw Ghetto. 

Since the song had to be sung in Yiddish, he would explain the lyrics in Russian, as follows: 

'Never say that you have reached the very endWhen leaden skies a bitter future may portend;For sure the hour for which we yearn will not arriveArid our marching steps will thunder: we survive'. 

For a moment there was no sound from the stunned audience; then a single intrepid young woman stood up and applauded, and the entire audience joined in a swelling wane of applause before my father could sing a single note. Only this response to my fathers remarks remains on the recording; Stalin's censors simply cut out his remarks, and they have disappeared..." 

The Song of the Wamaw [sic] Ghetto Rebellion sung in Yiddish (Zog Nit Keynmol) - remains an a crowning jewel of this recording of the Concert. The combination of power and pathos with which my father delivered this song transfixed his listeners. When he finished, the audience released its accumulated tension like an explosive charge. Although his listeners included many of Moscows Jewish intellectual elite who were waiting for Stalins axe to fell on them, the great majority were Russian members of the Party elite which was being decimated by a purge. Jews and Russians alike, in some places seated side-by-side, were either walking in the shadow of death or had lost someone close... 

After that first release, the ovation continued to swell and recede in a series of waves which ebbed and flowed. People stood, applauded and cried out; they called my father by his patronymic-Pavel Vasilevich; some who were total strangers fell info each others arms and wept; still others sat silently with tears streaming down their faces. The first part of the audiences response is captured on this recording, but the rest has been cut by the censors. Still, the sound of this cry of hope is unforgettable, and there is little doubt that it was heard by the Master himself"

**********
Zog Nit Keynmol Hymn of the Jewish Partisans

Never say that this is the end of the road.
Wherever a drop of our blood fell, there our courage will
grow anew.
This song, written in blood, was sung by a people fighting
for life and freedom.
Our triumph will come and our resounding footsteps will
proclaim "We are here!"

From land of palm-trees to the far-off land of snow.
We shall be coming with our torment, with our woe;
And everywhere our blood has sunk into the earth
Shall our bravery, or vigor blossom forth.

We'll have the morning sun to set our day aglow;
Our evil yesterdays shall vanish with the foe.
But if the time is long before the sun appears,
then let this song go like a signal through the years.

This song was written with our blood, and not with lead;
It's not a song that summer birds sing overhead;
It was a people, amidst burning barricades,
That sang this song of ours with pistols and grenades.

Sunday's poem: 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak by Jerzy Ficowski

Jerzy Ficowski's poem 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak can be found in  Hilda Schiff's book Holocaust Poetry.

The poem is an elegy to the final act of  Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish pediatrician, educator, author who established and run orphanages in Warsaw for 30 years.  

As the principal for children houses (orphanages), a doctor, a publisher of a children's newspaper, as well as an author and expert witness in court, Korczak fought for a better life for children.

When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 the orphanages were moved into the ghetto. Korczak lived with the children and his staff under inhumane conditions and although he was offered the chance to escape Korczak refused, choosing to stay with the children.  

On August 5th 1942 the entire orphanage, including children and staff, with a thousand others from the ghetto, were marched to the railroad marshaling yard, to be transported east to the Treblinka Concentration Camp  A person in the crowd  witnessed the extraordinary drama and lived to describe* it: (* the quotes  are taken from an article about Korczak on the website of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota):

"Forced into tight formation, body against body, driven by guards wielding whips on all sides, the solid mass of humanity was forced to run toward the train platform. Suddenly the Commandant ordered the Secret Police to pull back . ...

"At the head of a thin line was Korczak! No, how could it be? The scene I shall never forget. In contrast to the mass of humanity being driven like animals to slaughter, there appeared a group of children marching together in formation. They were the orphanage children walking four abreast in a line behind Korczak. His eyes were lifted to heaven. Even the military personnel stood still and saluted. When the Germans saw Korczak, they asked, `Who is that man?' ... "

Another survivor, who succeeded in fleeing from the railroad platform, remembered the scene as Korczak and the children were put into the cattle cars.

"These children did not cry, these innocent little beings did not even weep. Like sick sparrows they snuggled up to their teacher, their caregiver, their father and their brother Janusz Korczak, that he might protect them with his weak, emaciated body . ..."

The train took them all to the death camp at Treblinka where Korczak, his staff and the children all perished in the gas chambers.

5.8.1942  IN MEMORY OF JANUSZ KORCZAK

What did the Old Doctor do

in the cattle wagon

bound for Treblinka on the fifth of August

over the few hours of the bloodstream

over the dirty river of time

I do not know

what did Charon of his own free will

the ferryman without an oar do

did he give out to the children

what remained of gasping breath

and leave for himself

only frost down the spine

I do not know

did he lie to them for instance

in small

numbing doses

groom the sweaty little heads

for the scurrying lice of fear

I do not know

yet for all that yet later yet here

in Treblinka

all their terror all the tears

were against him

oh it was only now

just so many minutes say a lifetime

whether a little or a lot

I was not there I do not know

suddenly the Old Doctor saw

the children had grown

as old as he was

older and older

that was how fast they had to go grey as as

Jerzy Ficowski

(translated by Keith Bosley)
 

Remembering the Holocaust: Righteous among the nations

More than 60 years after its occurrence the Holocaust remains a cataclysmic decisive moment in history. How are we to keep the reality and horror of it alive in our minds? Yad Vasham is the world centre for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust

Righteous Among the Nations is a project established as part of Yad Vasham to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust and grant them them the title Righteous Among the Nations.

I am currently reading a remarkable book edited by Mordecai Paldiel titled Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust that tells the stories of 150 ordinary European citziens who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. These are deeply affecting stories of selfless men and women who by their example show that there is no limit to human compassion and human goodness. The stories are a reminder of the courage of Jewish and non-Jewish people who took a stand to uphold human values at a time of unfolding terror.

The following is an extract from a 1998 speech by Mordecai Paldiel about Righteous Among the Nations:

"The Holocaust has been termed a watershed event in human history; that nothing afterwards will ever be the same again. A dangerous red line has been crossed, and man was shown at his worst.

We have an obligation, indeed, to ourselves and to posterity to remember this terrible event, as a lesson and a warning, lest it happen again. At the same time, however awesome the unspeakable crime committed by the Nazis, we dare not allow this to lead us to hopelessness and despair; to unwittingly profess a negative philosophy of life; that is, that the world is governed by the law of jungle; that the strong prevail and the weak go under.

To help us maintain this image of man, the Holocaust has provided us examples of human behavior at its most elevated best; of men and women, within German-occupied Europe, and from all walks of life, who were prepared to risk their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. These we term, at Yad Vashem, "Righteous Among the Nations," and we honor them in special dignified ways".

Paldiel points that Yad Vashem is important for three reasons:

(1) The basic human and religious obligation of recognizing and acknowledging goodness, and its principal actors, for its own sake. This is an elementary and minimal obligation, of identifying and pointing out the persons who through their courageous deeds make it possible for us to continue believing in goodness as an inherently human quality.

(2) To emphasize, through the example of the Righteous, persons from all walks of life, that in spite of the dangers, it was possible to save Jews from the Nazis.

(3) To use the example of these rescuers as role models for the education of future generations