Through 22 stories and 130 locations, a photographer retraces a haunting 'pathway to genocide'

Shmuel Atzmon-Wircer, Tel Aviv, 2017: Atzmon-Wircer and his family were able to escape to Russia during the war, and sent to a forced labour camp in Asino, Siberia. He would later devote much of his life to Yiddish theatre, in an attempt to preserve and celebrate the language. “I once said in Yad Vashem [the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre] that the real heroes are the ones who, after going through [the Holocaust] as children, still became positive people, a 'mensch' as we call them in Yiddish. These are the biggest heroes in life that I know.”

Germany, 2016: The roll-call area at Dachau. One of the first concentration camps, Dachau was opened in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. At first it was for political prisoners – later Jews and other groups the Nazis deemed inferior or contrary to their ideology. A site of human experimentation and torture, an estimated 41,000 people died at the camp. 

Aaron Ianco (1870-1943), right, in a photograph of a photograph taken by his great grandson, Marc Wilson. Wilson traced the story of Ianco to Convoy 46, a transport of Jews that left the French internment camp at Drancy on 9th February, 1943. The train was bound for Auschwitz, where Ianco was murdered on arrival.

Paris, 2017: a scene at Drancy. The camp was located outside of Paris in a radical housing project named La Cité de la Muette – the 'silent city' – built in the 1930s. With the rise of the Vichy government the buildings became an internment centre, from where approximately 70,000 Jews and other 'undesirables' were deported by freight rail to concentration camps.  

Arthur Rose, New York, 2017: with his sister Anna, they escaped from the Ukranian ghetto in Lviv before it was liquidated, from where they went into hiding. Their parents were killed by the SS, with the children eventually reaching Krakow on the eve of liberation, where they went to live with the niece of their cousin, whose kindly father returned from a concentration camp after the war. As Anna recalls in A Wounded Landscape, “I remember he asked me what was my favourite fairytale. I told him it was Hansel and Gretel, and he said, “...in the concentration camps, they were ovens also, but they didn’t fatten us up to put in the oven. They starved us and when we were starved, they put us in the ovens.” That was the first time I’d heard about the ovens and it was the first and last time that anybody said anything to me about the concentration camps.”

Ukraine, 2018: rail line where youngsters Arthur (10) and Anna (8) Rose escaped Lviv on a train bound for Krakow in 1945. Their parents arranged for them to be smuggled out of the Lviv ghetto in sacks by a sympathetic German soldier. They later learned their parents were murdered by the SS. 

Romania, 2018: During World War II, between 1940 and 1944 Romania allied with Germany, and conducted a series of pogroms – violent persecutions – against its Jewish population. The worst was in the city of Iași, with around 13,000 killed in June 1941. These killings took the form of street attacks, roundups and mass executions at the hands of civilian mobs, militia and police perpetrators. Many were herded into the 'Iași death trains', in which carriages packed with thousands of Jews were sealed as they travelled this line, with many of the occupants dying of thirst and suffocation. 

France, 2016: The disembarkation station below Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, Alsace. The only camp of its type on French soil, an estimated 22,000 people died here – many through forced labour in the nearby quarry. Others were executed, including four female British special operations soldiers. The camp also housed a gas chamber used for experiments on human subjects.

Germany, 2017: A mass grave at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In total over 50,000 people died at Belsen, including Jewish child diarist Anne Frank; conditions were so appalling that even after liberation, its former occupants continued to die at a rate of 500 per day. Over 13,000 inmates died after liberation. 

Austria, 2016: The cliffs of the old quarry – now flooded – at Mauthausen concentration camp. Mauthausen's forced labour involved inmates, packed together on a steep ramp of the quarry, carrying heavy rocks up the so-called 'stairs of death', a pointless labour designed to exhaust. Those sent to Mauthausen – initially political dissidents, POWs and later Jews – carried the official instructions Rückkehr unerwünscht (return not desired). As such, conditions were brutal, with summary beatings, unsustainable labour and starvation a common cause of death. These cliffs were known as the ’parachute jump‘, where prisoners who had reached the top of the stairway were selected by guards and forced to jump to their deaths.