20/4/01

Snapshots that were not supposed to be seen

The Last Album - Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Ann Weiss. London, W.W. Norton. 224 pages. $39.95

In the hush before the Holocaust, when the future seemed perversely hopeful, young Jews courted, married and had babies. They went hiking, boating, sunbathing.
    In good times, there is always a camera to perpetuate the memories.
    They lived life unhurried, oblivious that the world was about to end.
    When the genocide befell, the first to be killed were the old and young, to destroy both the past and the future. With diligent industriousness, the Nazis obliterated not just life, but proof of it. Photographs were processed through the crematoria too.
    Jews in the camps took mortal risks to safekeep photographs, perhaps accepting the inevitability of death but desperate to salvage a scrap of evidence that they and their loved ones had once lived.
    “There are survivors who have described photos hidden in their boots or shoes,” writes Ann Weiss in The Last Album, “and one who even described folding a photo into a tiny wad to hide behind his back teeth, in order to escape detection during inspection.”
    On a pilgrimage to Auschwitz in 1986, Weiss, an investigative reporter from Philadelphia, wandered off on her own. “I entered a corridor just as my group was gathering for the bus,” she writes. “I heard the guide say, ‘Would you like to see what's in this room?'... The guide unlocked the door. When I looked at the photos in the room in Auschwitz, I saw six million faces conflated into one face. The familiar refrain 'six million' translated into six million times the individual, six million times Naftali and Raizele and Tziporah and Emanuel....”
    Weiss happened upon a forgotten trove of 2,400 pictures amassed by the Jews and successfully hidden from the Nazis - an exceptionally rare discovery.
    She devoted the following years to copying, studying and researching the photos. Incredibly, she succeeded in identifying many of these people by name, and found details of their lives and descriptions of the photos. She discovered that some of them had survived, tracked them down, and interviewed them.
    Perhaps what is most astonishing, and revelatory, is the happiness that pervades these photos of a doomed generation: the radiating smiles, frivolity, romance, playfulness, the joy of life: the normalcy. Teenage couples at a cafe in 1932. Dashing boulevardiers and their dolled-up belles. Out in the backyard, playing cards. Hanka Tintpulwer, laughing and lolling with her boyfriend in the park (she survived, and lives in Australia). Artur Huppert and his cherished child, Peter (they did not survive).
    Zionism was then an almost dreamy concept, and is prevalent in these pictures: religious Zionists in Poland preparing for aliya in 1935; youths dancing the hora.
Photos from Tel Aviv ended up in Auschwitz; sometimes, people did: one woman was convinced to leave the wilderness of Palestine and return to Poland.
    Another photo is described by a survivor: “Bela lived next door to Cukierman. She was Kugelman's daughter. She went also to Israel, but when we returned to Poland in 1927, she decided to stay in Israel. I found her again after the war.”
    Genya and David Manela survived. Gaddi, the son they bore following the war, was shot dead by an Arab in 1968.
    The very existence of The Last Album is a minuscule triumph over the attempt to eradicate these people and their memory.
    It is a harrowing book, because in these pictures there is an understandable yet shocking ignorance of the looming trauma and tragedy.
    But we know; we know what is about to descend upon these sadly happy people.
It is a wonderful book, because it shows not how we died, but how we lived.