Śmierć Żydów. Fotografie

by Nadine Fresco, Magdalena Kamińska-Maurugeon (Translator)

Punktem wyjścia wybitnego eseju Nadine Fresco jest osiem zdjęć ukazujących masakry Żydów na jednej z plaż w pobliżu łotewskiego miasta Lipawa. Widać na nich kobiety i dziewczęta, niekiedy nagie, zmuszane do pozowania przed śmiercią, i ciała rozstrzelanych, zsuwające się do wykopanych zawczasu dołów. Obrazy przedstawiające pierwsze prześladowania Żydów – bojkot ich przedsiębiorstw, "noc kryształową", łapanki – były publikowane w Trzeciej Rzeszy w celach propagandowych, ale robili je także – wbrew zakazom wydanym na początku masowych masakr – żołnierze i cywile, będący świadkami i uczestnikami tych zdarzeń. Nadine Fresco, opisując kilka z tych zdjęć z obiektywizmem i pozornym brakiem emocji charakterystycznym dla sztuki fotograficznej, osiąga efekt o nieprawdopodobnej sile.

Genres: Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, History

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2008

About the author

Nadine Fresco est une historienne française qui s'est particulièrement consacrée à l'étude de la Shoah et du problème du négationnisme.

Reviews

[Introverticheart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wstrząsający esej, który pozwala jak w soczewce pokazać skalę prześladowań, przemocy i okrucieństw II WŚ, skupiając się głównie na maskarze Żydów z łotewskiej Lipawy. Jest to ledwie fragment znacznie obszerniejszej pracy francuskiej historyczki Nadine Fresco, który na pewno chciałbym kiedyś przeczytać.

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the most horrific book I have ever seen. I wrote ‘seen’ instead of ‘read’ though it certainly requires dense reading. Like many books by historians, much of the actual content in buried in the endnotes, especially the accounts of the ‘Actions’, as the Nazis termed them, and the postwar trials of some of the perpetrators. But the most frightening features are the images, especially eight photographs taken on a beach on the shore of the Baltic Sea, 15-17 December 1941. The images are difficult to make out, but they appear to be groups of mostly women and a few children, huddled in groups or standing in their underwear or naked, and then lined up atop the sand dunes facing the sea. And then a pit full of what superficially looks like rubbish or old clothes but are really corpses and a mysterious eerie figure walking along the top whose job was to thrust into the sandpit any bodies that failed to tumble in on their own.

In the background we can see uniformed men carrying rifles, but although the Nazi SS were responsible for organizing and carrying out the massacre, the soldiers in the picture are not actually Germans but Latvian militiamen. The photographer was a German SS man, using a minicamera contrary to orders to record the scene, seemingly for his own amusement. The tale of how the prints survived, thanks to a Jewish prisoner, would scarcely be credible in a thriller. From the internet a couple more photos of the killings can be found and they help fill out the sequence: the women aligned facing the sea were just moments from being shot by the firing party.

One wonders if it was coincidence that no Germans appear in the photos, though amongst themselves the Einsatzgruppen (literally ‘task forces’) were proud of their achievements in eliminating the Jews in the Baltic regions, Poland and the Ukraine. To this day, the role of the local population, like these militiamen, remains fiercely a matter of political contention. Personally, I can imagine people I’ve known being responsible for such atrocities, especially looking at almost contemporary photographs of lynching in America. But I believe the Nazis lowered the barriers to barbarism beneath anything previously imaginable, at least in the West, while at the same time preoccupied with legality, order, and record keeping. But there remained some evident, such as these photographs, they never intended.