Through 22 stories and 130 locations, a photographer retraces a haunting 'pathway to genocide' (II)
Ukraine, 2018: A street on the edge of the ghetto walls in Lviv containing the hiding place that once concealed the parents of children Anna and Arthur Rose. Smuggled out of the ghetto, the children managed to evade the Nazis; their parents were caught, and killed.
Ukraine, 2018. A block of flats on the site of Mukachevo's ghetto. On August 27 and 28 1941 many Jews of Mukachevo were amongst the 24,000 murdered by the ’Einsatzgruppen’ German soldiers in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre. The remainder were deported to Auschwitz.
The 'Grey House' at the former Płaszów concentration camp, near Krakow, Poland. The building was used as a prison, where inmates were tortured and confined in cells too small to sit down. It was also the office of camp commandant Amon Goth, whose sadistic treatment of Jewish prisoners – including shooting them for amusement from upstairs windows – were dramatised in the film Schindler's List. The site of the camp itself has remained largely untouched since its dismantling at the end of the war, with just a few interpretation panels and signs, some with the message, 'please respect the grievous history of this site' hinting at the atrocities that took place there.
Germany, 2018: An autopsy table at Buchenwald concentration camp. The camp was known to be the site of some of the Nazis' human experimentations, including deliberately burning inmates with phosphorous, and poisoning. Even if the victims survived, they were often murdered so the doctors could perform autopsies to observe the results.
Rita Weiss (1926-2018) Tel Aviv, 2017: Weiss survived several camps, including Auschwitz, where she experienced the infamous selection process – where civilians arriving at the camps were separated into those able to work, and those who would be sent straight to the gas chambers. Weiss was met off the train by notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. “[He] asked me how old I was. I was very afraid and I could not speak but my sister told me to say 20. Mengele took my arm and said “You are going right.” Later, she witnessed an exchange between two inmates: “One person asked, why they had gone right when the rest of his family had been taken left. “Why is our family not here?” The block commander, who was also a prisoner, said, “Do you not know what this place is? This afternoon your family have gone up in smoke.”
France, 2016: Woods beyond the perimeter fence of Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, located at 800 metres in the heavily forested Vosges mountains of Alsace. The camp was enclosed by 3-metre-high electrified barbed wire.
Henri Borlant, Paris. 2017: A French Jew, as a teenager, despite bouts of typhus Henri survived 28 months in Auschwitz, then Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg and finally Buchenwald, where he escaped to a nearby town as American forces were entering. In A Wounded Landscape Borlant describes approaching Allied soldiers to tell them of the horrors of the camps: “The world outside knew nothing of the hundreds and thousands of human beings turned into smoke and ashes... They took us in jeeps and, when we arrived, the gates were open. The dead were on the roll call ground. We did not need to speak any more. They saw. They called [their superiors] and a few days later, they came with General Eisenhower... “Now our boys will know why they are fighting...It was justified.” He said these words. This was the first discovery of the mass murders. It was me and my friend who brought this about.”
Germany, 2016: A herb garden and plantation, formerly a forced labour camp attached to Dachau. The garden was used as an experimental site for the Nazis to develop medicines and cultivation methods. Deployment to the garden was feared by inmates, who were forced to work outside in all weathers.
Harry Mans (1933-2020) London, 2018: Born in Amsterdam, as a child Mans was sheltered by the Dutch resistance in a series of hiding places as the occupying Germans imposed restrictions, then persecutions, on the Jewish population. He found a stability for the final year of the war with a family in Leerdam. Reunited with his mother after the liberation, he stayed in 'constant touch' with his adopted family throughout their lives. Of his reunion he told Marc Wilson, "It came as a terrible shock to me and perhaps even more so to [my guardians] Adrie and Mees. I looked on them as my parents. As I was only 11 and had not seen or heard from my mother for about two years, it was as though I was going to be taken to meet a stranger. They packed my suitcase, we said goodbye and I promised to write soon. I can honestly say this was one of the saddest days of my life.”
Latvia, 2018: On November 30th, and December 8th, 1941, 25,000 Jews were murdered in or en route to the Rumbula forest, as part of the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. The massacre was part of process to make Latvia ‘Judenrein’ - 'Jew free'.
Poland, 2015: whereas concentration camps were places some survived, Chelmno was a 'killing centre' – a small facility whose sole purpose was execution, primarily by gas truck, en route to a mass grave. By this method, 172,000 people, mainly Jews from the surrounding Wartheland region, died here between 1941 and 1944.
