Dear
Friends,
Before we
settle fully into Chanukah mode, I wanted to share a reflection on the ‘Seeing
Auschwitz’ exhibition now installed (until March 23), in a gallery on Old
Brompton Road. It’s one of the most thoughtful, moving and powerful
presentations I can remember seeing.
The
curators do guide us through some historical background, but the exhibition is
not really about what happened, but rather about what it means to look at
images of Auschwitz. The first galleries feature images shot by an SS Officer.
The curation, both in the visual presentation and the excellent audio guide, draws us into a comparison of the dehumanising framing - emphasising the
‘efficiency’ of the operation, stripping the victims of their personhood – and
moments of intimacy and humanity that nonetheless pervade even these shots – a
man standing bewildered, missing a shoe, a camp inmate speaking to a recently
disembarked woman – at great personal risk, a young boy meeting the gaze of the
camera full-on…
In a photo
of a ‘selection,’ we see only the backs of men’s heads as they are pointed
towards immediate death or life-as-inmate by an SS ‘doctor.’ The audio guide alert us to the humanity of these men, clearly visible in
the photo, but only if we stop and look slowly. Our attention is drawn to the
pacing of victims as they head from the moment of selection towards the gas chamber visible in the rear of the image – “See how quickly these human
lives are dispatched,” the audio calls us to note. “How quickly were you
prepared to glimpse at this photo and move on?” To see humanity, we need to
look more slowly. It was at that point that I wrote off other afternoon plans
and settled in for the journey through other collections of images, all
remarkable, powerful and brilliantly curated.
There are
drawn images that survived on scraps of paper, this time drawn by an inmate,
raising questions about agency and the reality of the behaviour of the SS Camp
Guards – who stand ‘noble’ in the photos taken by the SS Officer and whose
brutality is revealed in these illicit images drawn by an artist-inmate known
only as ‘M.’
Another
gallery features and curates for us two blurred photographs where piles of bodies
between gassing and cremation can be just made out. The photos – taken by
Jewish members of the Sonderkommando - are part-obscured by the need to hide
the camera as it was being used. Video testimony of survivor Sonderkommando
members contextualises these awful images.
Perhaps the
most sickening images are ones featuring smiles and laughter; taken by an SS
guard at the retreat centre for stressed guards, where they are encouraged to
consort with the ‘right’ sort of German women and relax.
The
exhibition is presented in a corporate venue and doesn’t clearly bear names we
would associate with material such as this. But its origins are an exhibition
prepared for the United Nations’ observance of the International Day of
Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and exhibited at UN
Headquarters, New York, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris and United Nations
Information Offices worldwide. The Memorial & Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau
and Yad Vashem are frequently mentioned and the lead curator, Paul Salmons,
helped curate the highly regarded Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum.
I recommend
it highly, particularly in these over-tinselled times. We’ll be lighting flames
in the coming days, may we all be touched by the miracles of survival and
insistence on the importance of acknowledging the right to
self-determination for our people, and all people.
Rabbi
Jeremy
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