The horror of Auschwitz in pictures

These works are fascinating not only in themselves but also for their histories. While the Nazis were proud of attempting to wipe out the Jews of Europe, by the time they were losing the war, they also realised they needed to hide the evidence of their crimes.

“The starting point of the collective memory of Auschwitz — the Auschwitz which is represented in movies, books and films — is dominated by a single series of photographs that come from one remarkable document called the Auschwitz album or the Lilly Jacob album,” Paul Salmans who is the exhibition’s lead curator, tells me.

“Lilly had been at Auschwitz but then moved to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where she was discovered, upon liberation, among the dead and dying as she had typhus. Placed in a barrack to recover, she got up one night to try and find some warmer blankets. She went into some drawers and underneath some neatly folded pyjamas she found this photograph album and, extraordinarily, she saw photographs of herself and her murdered brothers, others from her Czech community and even her rabbi.

“The photographs are the only visual representation we have of the selection process at a death camp. But although these photographs are remarkable evidence, they are also highly problematic. We explore how, because they are taken by Nazis to show how well ordered the concentration camps were, we really need to think about what we are looking at. That is why we contrast these photographers from the perpetrators with those from the victims.”

The most famous of these are the “Sonderkommando photographs”, which were taken secretly in August 1944, the only photographs taken of the gas chambers as they were being used. Not much is known about the person who took them, but he is usually known as Alex, a Greek Jew who was a member of the Sonderkommando who worked in and around the gas chambers.

It is clear they were taken hurriedly and they were shot from hip height in order to hide the camera. The Polish resistance then smuggled them out of the camp in a toothpaste tube.

“The difference between the well-ordered Auschwitz album and the Sonderkommando ones is the violence,” says Salmans.

“The Nazis don’t show the bodies of the dead — in fact they don’t show any physical violence. But the Sonderkommando ones were taken from inside the crematorium when the rate of killing was so high that the crematoria couldn’t keep pace with the number of bodies.”

That is not the only evidence that was left by Jewish people. “There’s also a series of pictures in a sketchbook that were torn out and hidden in a bottle which show the walk to the gas chambers and the gas chambers themselves with a compassion that is entirely absent from the photographs taken by the Nazis.

“This is what we attempt to do throughout the entire exhibition; restore something of the dignity to the victims. What we are trying to do is tell the stories of just some of the people and also show the resistance that was taking place within the camp because often the very fact of the survival of these photographs was an act of resistance.”

Even the famous Auschwitz photographs of the slave labourers looking like criminals were saved only by an act of resistance, says Salmans. “The prisoner photographers were told to burn the evidence when Auschwitz was being evacuated. But they filled the flames with wet photographic paper so that while thousands were destroyed, tens of thousands remain.”

There is also an element of the exhibition that looks at the outside world. There are some astonishing aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by the Allied forces, although they never bombed it, despite the pleas of the Jewish community and Polish resistance.

“The Allies knew what was happening in Auschwitz as early as 1942 — they knew it was an extermination camp,” says Salmans. “In Britain we tend to tell the story of our role in the Holocaust as one of the liberators because of course we did liberate the camps. But what is more problematic is why nothing was done before that. A decision was made not to bomb Auschwitz Birkenau even though they knew what was happening there.”

The complex and thoughtful exhibition also features photographs of the Nazis relaxing within the Auschwitz complex and others taken by a German teenager of the death marches.

There is a focus on the humanity of the victims, something so often missing; photographs and videos of the Jewish communities who were wiped out, the individuals who were thrust into gas chambers. And, almost refreshingly, the exhibition also features a look at modern-day antisemitism.

Salmans, who is not Jewish, says he doesn’t want people to leave the exhibition with a sense of catharsis believing that this was something that simply happened in the past. “One of the last series of images people will see is of the communities before the Holocaust; as a diverse community with hopes and dreams.

“I’ve always been interested in this subject because I am British, I am European and it is my culture which created this. I hope that we can help to try and understand how and why mass violence happens because it remains a difficult and challenging question.

“Sadly, neither antisemitism nor genocides have gone away; there is a bit in the exhibition when we acknowledge both of these. I’d like to hope that visitors to this exhibition rededicate themselves to understanding these things and doing more to prevent them.”

Seeing Auschwitz opens on October 20 at Old Brompton Road, South Kensington and will continue until early next year. seeingauschwitz.com