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.

Anna Swir: A Polish poetry giant

"You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face."

Anna Swir

I Carried Bedpans

by Anna Swir

I worked as an orderly at the hospital

without medicine and water.

I carried bedpans

filled with pus, blood and feces.

I loved pus, blood and feces-

they were alive like life,

and there was less and less

life around.

When the world was dying

I was only two hands, handing

the wounded a bedpan.

He Was Lucky

by Anna Swir

An old man
leaves the house, carrying books.
A German soldier snatches the books
and throws them in the mud.

The old man picks up the books,
the soldier hits him in the face.
The old man falls,
the soldier kicks him and walks away.

The old man
lies in mud and blood.
Underneath he feels
the books.

I Talk to My Body

by Anna Swir

My body, you are an animal

whose appropriate behavior

is concentration and discipline.

An effort

of an athlete, of a saint and of a yogi

Well trained

you may become for me

a gate

through which I will leave myself

and a gate

through which I will enter myself

A plump line to the centre of the earth

and a cosmic ship to Jupiter.

My body you are an animal

from whom ambition

is right.

Splendid possibilities

are open to us.

Anna Swir (1909-1984) was a Polish poet whose works deal with experiences during Word War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. 

Swir  was born in Warsaw  to an artistic, though impoverished family and studied medieval Polish literature at University. During the 1930's worked for a teachers association, as an editor and published poetry.

Swir joined the Polish resistance during WW2 and worked as a military nurse. She was arrested and faced a Nazi firing squad during the war, waiting 60 minutes to be executed. As well as writing poetry for Polish resistance underground publications, Swir cared for the wounded during the Warsaw Uprising and many of her poems are based on her experience.

Swir's poetry is sophisticated and powerful without the rhetorical embellishment that characterizes so much of what passes as poetry. Her poetry is purposeful, direct, simple and with a profound reverence for life.

Many of her poems record the experiences and ravages of war, although it was 30 years after the war before Swir would write and publish the poems about her wartime experience. As one reviewer notes those wartime experiences changed her poetry profoundly, bringing a concern for the value of the simplicity and immediacy of life.

Swir wrote candidly and passionately about the female body, sensuality and erotic love. Her poetry views the body with both intimacy and detachment.

After the war Swir lived in Krakow and wrote poetry, plays and stories for children and directed a children's theatre. Anna Swir died of cancer in 1984.

Other blog pieces featuring Anna Swir's poetry are 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."