AUSCHWITZ KATALOG OK 2400 ZNALEZIONYCH FOTOGRAFII

14-05-2014, 19:55
Aukcja w czasie sprawdzania nie była zakończona.

Aktualna cena: 89.99 zł

Użytkownik inkastelacja

numer aukcji: 4240889715

Miejscowość Kraków

Koniec: 24-05-2014 19:40:00

Dodatkowe informacje:
Stan: Używany

KLIKNIJ ABY PRZEJŚĆ DO SPISU TREŚCI

KLIKNIJ ABY PRZEJŚĆ DO OPISU KSIĄŻKI

KLIKNIJ ABY ZOBACZYĆ INNE WYSTAWIANE PRZEZE MNIE PRZEDMIOTY ZNAJDUJĄCE SIĘ W TEJ SAMEJ KATEGORII

KLIKNIJ ABY ZOBACZYĆ INNE WYSTAWIANE PRZEZE MNIE PRZEDMIOTY WEDŁUG CZASU ZAKOŃCZENIA

KLIKNIJ ABY ZOBACZYĆ INNE WYSTAWIANE PRZEZE MNIE PRZEDMIOTY WEDŁUG ILOŚCI OFERT

PONIŻEJ ZNAJDZIESZ MINIATURY ZDJĘĆ SPRZEDAWANEGO PRZEDMIOTU, WYSTARCZY KLIKNĄĆ NA JEDNĄ Z NICH A ZOSTANIESZ PRZENIESIONY DO ODPOWIEDNIEGO ZDJĘCIA W WIĘKSZYM FORMACIE ZNAJDUJĄCEGO SIĘ NA DOLE STRONY (CZASAMI TRZEBA CHWILĘ POCZEKAĆ NA DOGRANIE ZDJĘCIA).

PEŁNY TYTUŁ KSIĄŻKI -
AUTOR -
WYDAWNICTWO -
WYDANIE -
NAKŁAD - EGZ.
STAN KSIĄŻKI - JAK NA WIEK (ZGODNY Z ZAŁĄCZONYM MATERIAŁEM ZDJĘCIOWYM) (wszystkie zdjęcia na aukcji przedstawiają sprzedawany przedmiot).
RODZAJ OPRAWY -
ILOŚĆ STRON -
WYMIARY - x x CM (WYSOKOŚĆ x SZEROKOŚĆ x GRUBOŚĆ W CENTYMETRACH)
WAGA - KG (WAGA BEZ OPAKOWANIA)
ILUSTRACJE, MAPY ITP. -

DARMOWA WYSYŁKA na terenie Polski niezależnie od ilości i wagi (przesyłka listem poleconym priorytetowym, ew. paczką priorytetową, jeśli łączna waga przekroczy 2kg), w przypadku wysyłki zagranicznej cena według cennika poczty polskiej.

KLIKNIJ ABY PRZEJŚĆ DO WYBORU MINIATUR ZDJĘĆ

SPIS TREŚCI LUB/I OPIS (Przypominam o kombinacji klawiszy Ctrl+F – przytrzymaj Ctrl i jednocześnie naciśnij klawisz F, w okienku które się pojawi wpisz dowolne szukane przez ciebie słowo, być może znajduje się ono w opisie mojej aukcji)

Fotografie przywiezione do Auschwitz przez Żydów skazanych przez nazistów na zagładę.
Odnalezione na terenie obozu po jego wyzwoleniu, przechowywane są obecnie w Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu.
Photographs brought to Auschwitz by Jews condemned by the Nazis to be exterminated.
Found on the premises of the camp after the liberation, they are currently kept in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
Diese Fotografien stammen aus dem
Besitz der Juden, die von den Nazis
nach Auschwitz zur Vernichtung deportiert wurden.
Sie wurden nach der Befreiung auf dem Gelände des Lagers gefunden und befinden sich heute im Archiv des Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This publication was made possible thanks to the academic collaboration
of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim with the Fritz Bauer Institute -
Study- and Documentary Center on the History and Impact of the Holocaust in Frankfurt.
Research: Kersten Brandt, Hanno Loewy, Krystyna Oleksy, Marek Pelc
Translated into English by Barbara Owsiak, proofreading: Annamaria Bukowska
Graphic design: Piotr Kutryba The second edition

Copyright by Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu
2006
The first edition of this book has been funded by the German Federal States
Acknowledgements
Our special thanks go to those who have survived. We would like to thank them for several hours of discussions and many pieces of advice. Their invaluable support was of a great contribution to this publication:
Siegmund Pluznik
Tobka Bauer Marc Beck
Arieh Ben-Tov (Hassenberg) Marek Blumenfeld
Karola Bojm Eli Aron Broder
Zosia Buchszrajber-Frochtcwajg
Zwi Cukierman
Chaim Cygler
Abram Dafner
Cwi Dancyger
Bronka Divon
Michael Drexler
Aron Feldberg
Benjamin Gilad
Abraham Green
Isidor Grüngras
Ada Halperin
Tusia Hercberg
Heia Horowitz
Chana Itshaki
Hanka Kalfus
David Klajman
Shimon Krevinsky
Edith Lipson
Arno Lustiger
Haiina Lutkiewicz
Itka Matach
Se'ew Matach
Abraham Manela
Janet Moskowitz
Edward Nabiel
Bala Navon Dwora and Rame Nimrod
Rachel Nitsan Lea and Josef Orgler
Mundek Rechnic
Rivka and Yehuda Reich
Isaac Rypsztajn
Hala Stone
Benjamin Szlezyngier
Zygmunt Sztrochlic
Natan Sznur
Sally Wasserman
Elisheva Weiss
Aron Werdyger
Joan Wren
Lilly Zaks
Natan Zim
Józek Zylberszac
This publication serves as a catalogue to the exhibition presenting in a symbolic way the world of European Jews before the Holocaust.
The catalogue is a part of the "Interior Design for the Former Sauna Building in Birkenau" project, which could be realized thanks to the financial help from the German Federal States.
Our special thanks also go to the jury members who have chosen this project, and who have assisted us with their advice and experience:
Jeshajahu Weinberg (Chair)
Detlef Hoffmann Carry van Lakerveld
Helmut Morlok
Władysław Niessner
Józef Szajna
Arduous research work had to be carried out in several countries to complete this project. This was possible thanks to the financial support of several individuals, companies, and institutions. We would like to express our gratitude to the following:
Andrzej Bodek, Jürg Breuninger, Michael Hauck, Hedwig Hessel-bach, John Jahr, Dr. Klaus Peter Lang. Rudolf Leineweber, Harry Lis, Friedrich von Metzler, Dr. Jürgen Mülder, Klaus Schultz, Johannes Mario Simmel, Dr. Cornelie Sonntag-Wolgast, BHF -Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Emst-Ludwig-Chambre-Stiftung zu Lieh, Evangelische Kirche Hessen-Nassau, Degussa-AG, Förderverein Fritz Bauer Institut e.V., Frankfurter Hyphothekenbank, GEW-Landesverband Hessen, Hessische Lotterie-Treuhandgesellschaft, Hoechst-AG, IG-Metall, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung, Landeszentralbank Hessen, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Rheinbraun-AG, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen Thüringen, Georg und Franziska Speyer'sche Hochschulstiftung, Verband der Chemischen Industrie, Vereinigung deutscher Elektrizitätswerke Hessen.

KRYSTYNA OLEKSY

In the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum archives there is a unique collection of photographs presenting various scenes from the lives of Jewish families before the war: their daily work, weddings, children's birthdays, school classes and youth organizations, vacations with family and friends. Unfortunately the origin of this collection is not precisely known; no one can say who found the photographs or where they were found.
I think the most likely explanation is that they were found after the liberation on or near the grounds of the camp, in the barracks of "Kanada" where the belongings stolen from murdered Jews were sorted. This property was later put through disinfection and then sent into Germany where it was distributed to organizations and individuals. The special work detail (kommando) of prisoners put to work sorting these things removed all personal mementos and documents from the clothing belonging to the victims. Later they were burned in a special furnace.
The question arises, how could such a large collection has survived to the liberation? Perhaps someone knows the real answer, but it is rather likely that chance was responsible. The whole collection is comprised of 2,400 photographs. The largest part of it presents families of Jews from Zagłębie - Będzin, Sosnowiec and vicinity. There are also photographs made in other cities including Warsaw, Łódź, Leipzig and Olomouc. Many of them can be put together in large groups in which the same people, photographed at different places and times, can be recognized. A detailed analysis of them indicates that the whole collection consists of photographs belonging to a few families, and that the people from other cities were linked to them by family or friendship ties. It is possible that they were brought to Auschwitz by people belonging to one family, or living in one house, and certainly deported to the camp in the same transport. Most probably the workers in "Kanada" threw them into some box or other, or a suitcase, and simply forgot about them, and that they survived to the liberation in this way. A protocol written in the Auschwitz Museum on March 6,1951, seems to indicate that for a time they were indeed kept in a suitcase. Perhaps the same one in which they were discovered?
Somewhat later, in an effort to preserve the whole collection and to keep the photographs from being lost, unknown staff of the Museum glued them into albums they made especially for this purpose from accounts book pages of the kind then used for bookkeeping. Through the years the photographs were displayed numerous times at exhibitions in Poland and abroad (for example in Great Britan in 1980 and in USA in 1985). Some of them appeared in books, and Jerzy Ziarnik used them in a moving film called "Patrzę na twoją fotografię" ("I Am Looking at Your Photograph" - 1974). They could never be shown all together, however, because it was no simple matter to separate them from the album pages. They had to undergo conservation by experts. They had to be delicately unstuck, the traces of glue had to be removed, and they had to be protected against further deterioration. Only then could reproductions of both sides be made so that the whole collection could be worked with and research could begin. After they were unstuck from the pages it turned out that more than half of them had different kinds of markings on the reverse: the stamps of the photo studios that made them, dedications to the people to whom they probably were given, dates and names of places. Some had even served as post cards sent from vacations or other travels.
The Museum is publishing the whole collection in order to give expression to the memory of the victims of Auschwitz. We want the publication to be an homage to all those who died in the ghettos, concentration camps and death camps.We believe that this book could bring the people of today closer to the world of the European Jews, and in particular the world of the Polish Jews which was destroyed as a result of the Holocaust. After all, each of the people in the photographs - men, women and children, elders and youth - had a home, a life, brutally interrupted. Some of those in the photographs survived and could recognize themselves, their relatives, friends and acquaintances in these photographs, which often were the only surviving mementos. But the names and fates of many of them remain unknown.
We know what this book will mean to those who survived. They tell us so, and they are helping us identify more and more of the people. To speed work on collecting information on those in the photographs, the Museum initiated cooperation with the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (Genya Markon, Sharon Müller, Teresa Pollin). Copies of the photographs were sent to these institutions, and they joined in the laborious process of collecting data. Thanks to the exceptional involvement of many people we have information on a great number of the photographed people. Large funds had to be collected in order to carry out research and to create a data base. Obtaining data required dozens of interviews lasting many hours, trips, and showing the pictures to those who might be able to recognize another person. Without the dedication and help of many institutions and individuals the Museum alone could not have done the investigations and collected so much information.
Each of us engaged in the work on this extraordinary collection remains in close contact with a worldwide organization of Jews from Zagłębie, headquartered in Tel Aviv. Photocopies of the photographs are on permanent display at the organization's club where they meet every Wednesday. The photographs elicited moving recollections among many of the members, and they remembered specific names of people and places.
The last big meeting took place in Tel Aviv on October 20, 1997. Former students of Fürstenberg High School in Będzin were there; now scattered all over the world, they cherish memories of the place where they spent their youth. I have been fortunate to attend these meetings twice, and each time it was an unforgettable experience. I know many of these now-older, dignified men and women by their school nicknames: Jadzia Liwer is now Mrs. Joan Wren of the United States; Szewa Ingster is a woman I met as Szewa Weis, now living in Israel, at the first meeting with the people from Zagłębie; Marys Ptasznik came all the way from Sao Paulo as Mariano Tasny. Despite the span of a generation
separating us, despite the fact that all of us working on this subject in Oświęcim and Frankfurt were born after the war, that we have inherited the histories of our own nations - Jewish, Polish and German - that evening we all felt the same. We became the schoolmates of our hosts. We knew who the math teacher was, who the Polish language teacher was, we knew who went to Palestine before the war. With us then were those whose ashes remain today on the soil of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. We know their faces from the pictures, we know their names from what their friends told us, and we keep remembering that they died. Looking at the photographs we remember the ones after whom we have not the smallest mementos, the six million Jews, victims of the Holocaust, murdered in gas chambers, shot, tortured and starved in the ghettos and camps, dead of disease and emaciation. And to each of us it is clear that although we are trying to help the living recognize their families and friends in the photographs and to help them find joy in the sight of beloved faces (because for many these pictures are the only surviving memento), above all the Auschwitz collection is a great symbol, a symbol of an entire murdered people.
At the meeting were also representatives of the second, postwar generation of Jews from Zagłębie. For them the world in the Auschwitz photographs has yet another meaning. It allows them to know the land of their parents, which to many up to then had signified only graves and ashes, death camps and killing. The family scenes, landscapes from vacation spots like Krynica, Bystra, Zakopane and Rabka, city streets full of life, holidays and daily life presented in the photographs stir their interest, compel reflection and pose new questions.
As already said, it is not known what happened to the majority of the people in the photographs. Most of those who in 1943 resided in the ghettos in Sosnowiec and Będzin were deported to Auschwitz in August of that year. The rest were taken to work camps and other concentration camps. Not many returned. Only a few traces of their presence in the camp have been found in the Museum archive.
The photographs of several identified families can be clearly distinguished: those of the Broders and Kohns, Koplo-wiczes, Matachs and Hupperts. Together they account for several hundred photographs, showing members of these families in all kinds of settings. There are a roughly equal number of pictures of individuals who, as we know from accounts, led very sociable lives, and many people wanted to be photographed with them because of their position in the community. Among them are Beniamin Cukierman, Fela Rose and Sabka Konińska.
At the meeting of former Fürstenberg High School students, Eli Broder's son asked me to help him identify and locate a Polish woman who had been photographed by his father. Before the war she had worked as a nanny for his sister Bronka Broder-Kohn. After the war broke out and the ghetto was set up, she did not abandon her previous employers but did her best to help them. Eli Broder did not know what happened to her because he spent the war in the Soviet Union. Nor could he remember her name. For Eli Broder's son Szlomo, born after the war and living in Israel now, this is a serious matter. He is very interested in subjects connected with the history of Będzin and Silesia, and is active in the Association of Jews from Zagłębie. He asks for information that could help him reconstruct the later life of this Polish woman who befriended the Broders, or of her children. This new effort to make contact with members of the second generation of Poles and Jews seems especially interesting and worthwhile. Szlomo Broder was not the only representative of the second generation at this meeting. There were other sons and daughters of former residents of Zagłębie, among them Natan Zim's grandson, a teenager in high school, from the third generation. Most of them do not speak Polish, but their interest in Poland, the land of their parents and grandparents, is real. They want to find their roots, to find what tied their forebears to that land through the centuries. Many of them know that the source of what their parents contributed to Israel - and what those who built this country and laid its foundations contributed - was in Poland. And although today there are no Jewish towns in Poland, although the culture of the Polish Jews has been irrevocably destroyed because the people who created it and made it flourish were murdered, it is only here that the traces of that old life can still be found. The Polish and Jewish communities, despite the differences that divided them, and despite intentional and sometimes unintentional isolation, interpenetrated and affected each other. For these young Israelis who feel close to the histories of their parents or grandparents this is becoming increasingly clear, and thus the interest in everyday life in Poland, not only before the Holocaust but in the here and now. So the world in the old photographs found in Auschwitz lives anew, and for some becomes a source of inspiration to further action.
One of the former students of Fürstenberg High School, Mr. Zygmunt Płużnik, asked by colleagues from the Fritz Bauer Institute to help identify people in the photographs, has begun to gather photographs of his friends on his own. He has written to schoolmates scattered around the world. In a year he collected more than 200 pictures, which he presented to those at the meeting in a special display. It deeply moved those present, who recognized themselves and their friends and family, of whom there often were no other mementos.
I hope that in the near future we will succeed in recreating that lost world and restoring the memory of the Broders and Cukiermans - of little Piotruś Huppert, whose parents, Artur and Grete, often made pictures of him as keepsakes for his grandparents in Będzin - and of the other people depicted in the photographs in the Archive.
KERSTEN BRANDT, HANNO LOEWY, MAREK PELC
2400 moments. Photographs of deportees from the archive of the Auschwitz Memorial
"Photographs... so many photographs. All sorts of photographs. Big ones and small ones. They slip from torn pockets. Lie scattered on the floor. You step on them. In the beginning, the women tried to decipher the inscriptions on the back of the photographs as they fell from the pockets. Now, nobody pays attention anymore. Rifka, the cleaner, sweeps them into the bin. Nobody seems to notice: Schultze notices. Even the faces on the photographs don't mean much to anybody anymore: now everybody is used to them lying on the floor: young women with their bridegrooms on their wedding day, smiling babies in cradles; boyish faces with touchingly smart eyes. People have taken these pictures with them - as souvenirs of their lives."2

Pictures of deportees, of people that have been robbed of their rights, their possessions, their friends and relatives, their identities and finally their lives. They are fragments of memory, ripped from an album.
I.
More than half of the photographs have inscriptions in different languages written on their backs. Some show dedications to friends and relatives. Some have the stamp of the photographer's studio. Others have a place and a date written on the picture. These multi-lingual inscriptions have been transcribed and translated. They provide the first clues as to their origin, their owners and the identity of the people shown in the pictures. We decipher names that sound foreign and we try to find unknown places on the map.
The pictures were taken in the twenties and thirties, older ones are also among them. Most of the pictures come from Będzin, an industrial town with 50 000 inhabitants, half of those were Jewish before the German invasion into Poland, situated in Zagłębie-Dąbrowskie, an area of heavy industry and coal-mining east of Katowice and about 40 km north-west of Auschwitz. The collection also contains pictures from nearby cities, some from France, the Netherlands and Leipzig. They are holiday photographs or pictures that emigrants have sent to their families in Poland. The inscriptions in different languages - Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German, French and English - mirror the political upheavals in Poland as well as the aims of Jewish emigration. In the twenties and thirties, mostly young people left the country heading towards the USA, Canada and Palestine. Until 1918, Russian was the official language in Zagłębie. The Jewish middle-class and the left-wing, non-religious Zionists spoke Polish. Hebrew was spoken amongst members of the religious youth movement, Yiddish was the language of pious non-Zionists and socialists unionists.3 The pictures from Leipzig with scribbled notes in German on their backs, probably belonged to Polish Jews living in Germany before they were driven away to Poland via the border village Zbąszyń in 1938.4
II.
"(...) something has posed in front of this same tiny hole and has remained there forever."5
Every picture captures a moment in which time stands still. Looking at it, we search for signs of continuity -landscapes, places and faces, that we recognise on other photographs.
We notice individual and general elements of that specific time. An image of Będzin and its surrounding areas brings before our eyes: a broad main road with buildings of the Gründerzeit-era and little parks, but also despoiled landscapes with industrial sites in the background. Alongside, there are holiday pictures from Zakopane, a favourite skiing resort in the Tatra mountains, and from Krynica, a glamourous spa town. Pictures that tell stories of undamaged lives. There are spontaneously taken pictures and pictures taken by a professional photographer. Snapshots and postcards. Married couples going for a walk in the spa's public park had their pictures taken, playing children were photographed by their parents. Photographers have fixed certain memorable moments in these pictures: wedding ceremonies, family get-togethers, but mainly scenes from everyday life: walks on the main roads of Będzin, playing children, and other leisure activities. They are typical snapshots. Taking pictures was a popular pastime. Therefore, the number of photographs depicting the world of work and commerce is small. At most, people posed in front of their own stores to be photographed. Just as the pictures only show a certain part of life, the faces on the pictures and their owners only represent a fragment of the society of Będzin. Most of them belonged to the well-off Jewish middle-class.
1 Published so far: Cornelia Brink "Beim Sichten des fotografischen Nachlasses. Privatfotos in Auschwitz", in: Fotogeschichte. Beitrage zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, 15. Jg., H. 55 (1995). Kersten Brandt, "Fotografien von Deportierten" in: Rundbrief Fotografie, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1999). Hanno Loewy, "2400 Fotografien, gefunden in Birkenau", in: Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie. 15. Jg., H. 55 (1995), p. 11-18, and Hanno Loewy, "'Der Skandal ihres Schweigens'. Zu den Privatfotos der Ermordeten von Auschwitz-Birkenau", in: Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.). Auschwitz. Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung. [Year book 1996 on the history and impact of the Holocaust]. Frankfurt am Mam/New York: Campus, 1996
2 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Das Haus der Puppen. München: Piper. 1993 p. 12 [House of Dolls - out of print] (Remark of the translator The quoted excerpts from novels and essays have been translated after the German quotes in the original essays. So, only the bibliographic detail for the German versions is given here. If the novel is also available in an English translation, the English details are given)
3 Union: Jewish-Socialist party, against Zionism, fought for national and social equality of the Jewish population in Poland
4 This was caused by a decree of the Polish home secretary from 6 October, 1938, that asked national Polish people living abroad to have checked and extended their passports until 29 October, 1938. Otherwise, they would have lost their right to return to Poland.
5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage 1993, p. 78.
We place these scattered, seemingly coincidental photographical moments in a sequence, just as we believe them to have been stuck into albums or to have been stored away in little boxes. Family photographs tell stories of several decades in an instant. We try to approach that life again, to reconstruct biographies. We, for whose eyes these pictures were not intended, try to become familiar with these images and to discover familiar elements. This is what governs our gaze: "You don't see, you recognise."6
Despite recurrent objects and motifs and their stereotypical format - particularly of professional family photographs - no clichéd image of an intact world arises. These photographs also include what the photographer and the photographed person presumably would have liked to have omitted. The pictures also show fractions and contradictions: the daughters of the orthodox family Koplowicz obviously liked being photographed in fashionable clothes, sometimes even in swimming costumes. Only a few pictures exist of traditionally dressed men. Numerous photos, sent to remaining relatives by young families who had left Poland, suggest a breaking-up of traditional family structures as well. A young family in Toronto sends pictures of a grand-daughter with handwritten comments in Yiddish to her parents in Sosnowiec. Teenagers prepare themselves for their emigration to Palestine in summer camps set up by Zionist organisations. Hence, these pictures not only portray private life, but they also reflect political and social changes that have influenced the lives of every single person.
Photographs seem to be a truthful copy of reality like no other medium. Pictures taken with pocket-cameras set themselves apart from the public world of images by focusing on the personal. Through his choice of objects, of a moment and of a certain perspective, the photographer conveys his view of the world. At the same time they integrate the public world of images into the personal in stereotypical and recurrent views of certain places. The people shown on the pictures use the photograph as an opportunity for self-representation.
"In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art."7
The photographer and the person photographed act with sometimes more, sometimes less skill. The pictures are of different quality, the portrayed persons more or less present. We like certain faces and instantly recognise them on other pictures. We make up names for them and imagine their stories. By projecting our personal memories onto these photographs, we approach their lives and distance ourselves at the same time. The people on the pictures appear to be strangely present. It is as if we have tried a little to put off their deaths. Something seems to shimmer behind the surfaces of the pictures. What seems to be depicted as truthful to reality, also refers to something it does not show at all; to something that could have been different, to dreams.
III.
What significance did these photographs have for their owners? "They are pictures, that promise security and continuity, that should last, from a region, that hardly changed. They stand up against the changing and the fugitive, against the unpredictability of being, against surprise and catastrophe."8
For the people on the pictures a catastrophe takes place when the Germans invade Poland. On 9 September, 1939, German occupiers are setting fire to the main synagogue and the surrounding houses in Będzin. Many Jews lose their lives in the flames or are shot. Anti-Jewish measures are introduced, Jewish property is confiscated and the right of free movement in the town is revoked.
Many series of photographs stop, some were continued for some time. Changes can be read from stigmatising badges, arm-bands and "Jewish Stars". The surroundings have changed as well: Gründerzeit-facades, main roads and parks no longer constitute the background. Now small buildings and streets on the outskirts of the town of Będzin can be seen. The Jewish population had been resettled there. Stores were "Aryanised." Also, the one of the Koplowicz family: a picture shows the entrance with the family's name plate. Another picture in front of a store. Cesia and Róża Koplowicz are standing in front of the entrance with three young women. They are wearing arm-bands with the blue star of David, as stipulated for Jews since July 1941.9 In the shop window, there is a sign in German: "For the holidays." It cannot be deary discerned from that picture if it is the same shop. (p. 135, 1 -2, 4-5)
The number of pictures of weddings is striking: many couples got married in the ghetto because it temporarily protected men from being deported to a work camp. At the same time, they document the will to maintain a "normal" life even under conditions which despised the needs of humanity.
Almost half of the pictures of the Huppert family (p. 159-176), a prosperous family from Teśin near the Polish-Czech border, date from the time after 1939. In the earliest pictures from the twenties, Artur Huppert and his brothers and sisters are putting themselves on stage like stars from the silent cinema, with dramatic gestures and effects of light and shade. After the birth of their son Peter in 1938, Artur Huppert and his wife Grete record the development of their child in numerous photographs which Artur Huppert inscribed with lengthy comments and then sent to the grandparents Rosa and Josef Huppert in Będzin. In June 1940, Artur Huppert writes: "My child Peterle is 20 months now and on 9 July 1940 I became 31 years old. My child was born fourteen days before that. Only my child doesn't know how hard and bitter this world is that he was born into, better that he should not know anything further" (p. 175,7). Since November 1940, pictures were only sent to the address of Rosa Huppert. The last pictures date from May 1941. In June 1942, Artur, Grete and Peter were deported to Theresienstadt and from there to Baranovichi, where they were murdered. Up to now, we have not found anybody who can remember this family. The circumstances of their deaths could be reconstructed with the help of documents.10
The misery in the ghetto can only be guessed at from some of these pictures. Only several studio-photographs exist that give an impression of a farewell: Benjamin Cukierman, a passionate skier, had another picture taken with his wife Edzia. (p. 305, 4-5; p. 306, 1-2)
The last family photograph of the Malach family was taken in 1942 on Icchak's and Sara Malach's wedding day (p. 152, 2). Their faces reflect sorrow and anxiety. Maybe it is the last picture of our collection. In May 1942, the deportations of the Jews of Będzin to Auschwitz started. In August 1943, the entire ghetto, excluding a small "Aufräumungskommando" (cleaning unit), was finally deported. Almost all deportees from Będzin were gassed immediately after their arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
IV.
Private photographs are a communicative medium. They are taken together and they are remembered together. These pictures not only represent a past, they were also made for the future: "The decision for taking the photograph may have been spontaneous, but its production always contains a projective moment of a future 'now', that shall allow us to look back at the past."11 But the pictures of the deportees don't have a future anymore. Only some of the portrayed persons have survived the Holocaust. And those that have survived have lost their friends and families. The collective memory has been destroyed.
The archive of the Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau is the "wrong place" for the photographs of the deportees. They belong in family albums, in little frames, in purses. But the owners of the pictures and the people photographed have been murdered. Families and communities have been annihilated. The original context of the pictures has been destroyed.
This collection of photographs came into existence through the murder of their owners. Today the pictures, private memories of the dead, are also documents of the crime that has been committed against their owners.
That life, portrayed by the private pictures of the deportees, has been destroyed. The continuity, that should have been reflected in them, has been violently interrupted. We see faces and yet we are unable to break through the anonymity of the pictures. Today only a few people can take up the memories that are buried in the pictures. Most viewers today have a different perspective of time. An exhibition and the publication of these photographs can leave the pictures as a projection site for questions and associations. They mediate impressions of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. But above all, they let us participate in an emphatic and often loving look at the portrayed persons.
"What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occured only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially."12
This sentence seems to apply especially to the private photographs of the deportees of Auschwitz. The "inexorable passage of time"13 does not lie between us and these pictures. In between lies the catastrophe, that one, that should not have happened.
V.
The photograph itself only depicts a certain moment. It does not have a past or a future. Originally these pictures represented life stories. They preserved the owner's memory of a personal or familial past, and they saved the traces of their lives as copies of their most significant stages.
Without the narratives of their owners these pictures have to remain silent. Today we are looking for survivors who could break the silence of these photographs. Family stories can be reconstructed when talking to them, the singular fragments can be put together to form life stories. Stories of families and of everyday life can be the impetus to bring movement back to these static photographs.
Kersten Brandt

WRÓĆ DO WYBORU MINIATUR ZDJĘĆ

WRÓĆ DO WYBORU MINIATUR ZDJĘĆ

Możesz dodać mnie do swojej listy ulubionych sprzedawców. Możesz to zrobić klikając na ikonkę umieszczoną poniżej. Nie zapomnij włączyć opcji subskrypcji, a na bieżąco będziesz informowany o wystawianych przeze mnie nowych przedmiotach.