“Seeing Auschwitz” – A Reflection from Rabbi Jeremy

 

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