Look again

As Holocaust Memorial Day approaches, Mirella Yandoli reflects on the questions posed by images of Auschwitz.

ON average 4.7 billion photos are taken a day.

It is also estimated that 20 per cent of the photos taken since 1800, were taken in the last 12 months. The proliferation of cheap digital cameras and then phone cameras, the ability to travel affordably and see things for ourselves, has resulted in each of us taking a record of what we see, whenever we want, and on an unimaginable scale. The world has never been more accessible or recordable. We take 10 or 15 shots of the same subject and when we’re sightseeing we are surrounded by people taking their own photo of the same statue, building or sunset…or extermination camp.

The awkward, almost inappropriate juxtaposition of standard tourist subjects and sites of mass and systematised murder is jarring but deliberate. How is one supposed to act at a site like Auschwitz? Has it become a form of tourism, tagged onto other bus day trips from Krakow? What does it mean to take pictures there and what do you do with them afterward?

My reflection is focused on what it means to view and record the place names of the Holocaust, to create new Holocaust imagery ourselves and view what already exists. I have also reflected a lot on the photos I took while I was there. I am lucky to have a photography enthusiast for a father who also runs a small dark room studio. He offered to develop some photos for me and lent me a simple point and click camera, his efforts to get me to try anything more complicated having utterly failed. Despite said camera lingering on the hallway table for months, visiting Auschwitz seemed like the most appropriate place to use the film. Alongside my digital snapshots of the famous gates and railway tracks, I now have several prints in black and white of these same views which have triggered very different reflections.

“ The awkward, almost inappropriate juxtaposition of standard tourist subjects and sites of mass and systematised murder is jarring but deliberate.

Many people who have visited, apparently, report being (as weird as this may sound) surprised that the buildings weren’t in black and white. They remark on the lush green forest and blue sky feeling somehow ‘wrong in a place like that.’ Some people swear that birds cannot be heard singing there. The reality is, of course, colourful and alive and part of this world but I can definitely relate to an indescribable need to see the place reflect the horror of what happened there, for nature to somehow avoid it and for it to be frozen in time.

This stayed with me throughout the trip as I observed my own mixture of emotions when we visited places which have become iconic for all the wrong reasons; Warsaw, Łódź, Krakow and Auschwitz. I associate these names with violence, invasion, ghettos and decimated Jewish communities which once thrived. I was preoccupied with a feeling that I was here to really take these places in, to reabsorb the significance of the Holocaust but to also see them as these places are today. At least half of the people I met with guided us through life in Poland today including the political challenges, the role of the Church in relation to both politics but Jewish-Christian relations, the Jewish community as both visible and present, to name a just a few examples. This last point was probably the most important and tricky to address given so many international visitors come to visit Poland as if the entire country represents a graveyard, a marker of what has been lost. Given it was once the largest Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world, the contrast with what there is now is very real. However the contemporary Jewish community means it is not just a site for memorial, there is a Jewish future to celebrate here too. This could not have felt more real than on the final night in Krakow where we were hosted in the Jewish Community Centre for a Shabbat meal.

Another layer this visit added was the Oneg Shabbat Archive. If anything brings me to tears thinking of this visit, I just need to consider the post card that was dropped from the train to Treblinka, or the simple mark of a woman on a piece of paper stating her name and ‘I was here’. Oneg Shabbat was a code name for an underground group organised by Emanuel Ringelblaum. It met weekly to compile an archive of all aspects of life and death in the ghetto, from its establishment until the ghetto uprising in 1943. All types of material were hidden in milk cans and buried, from official records to ration cards, children’s drawings and sweet wrappers. It is only with modern technology that archivists have been able to restore paper damaged by water and time so we can all now access it and fully reflect on everything discovered.

The risks involved in compiling this archive coupled with the effort and clear moral foresight to ensure that history was preserved through the eyes of the victims has gifted those who have come after with something so precious it is hard to put to words. It has certainly made me look again and reflect anew on the photos from the Second World War that we are so accustomed to seeing and wondering from whose perspective these photos were taken, given that the vast majority would have been taken by Nazi soldiers, inviting you to see the subject through their perspective.

My final reflection ends with the photographs I am left with of my own. In particular a photo of one of the train wagons I saw not long after arriving into Auschwitz I. Who this train transported and from where I will never know, I will also never know what happened to them. The photo acts as a memorial because it invites me to ask such questions, to consider the unknowns, to pray for those who also saw it but from the inside. That I stood in front of it and captured it myself, freezing a few seconds of October 2023 and that I chose to use a black and white camera that made an audible sound in contrast to everyone else’s silent touch screen technology. The final image is a reminder that this is not an icon but a highly subjective snapshot of an object which continues to exist, probably slightly more weathered now, and has probably been photographed numerous times since I was there. This reminder is important because I think we have become too accustomed to seeing the Holocaust as an image, as an icon. We don’t think of it as thousands of images, including the ones we take today. We don’t always meditate on who captured them and the messages they may tacitly contain and the tiny, collectivised impressions they leave on us.

Holocaust sites are visited and treated and photographed like other tourist destinations. Tourists get back on the bus and go on to visit mountains – no one will invite them to stop and pause unless they choose to do so themselves. This photo confronts me to stop and think, and to look again.