Faces, looking at which the heart contracts: Photographer-retoucher painted black and white pictures of prisoners of Auschwitz

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

According to the most conservative estimates, from 1940 to 1945, 1, 1 million people died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This is more than a million destinies, each of which is worthy of a separate story. So that we, the descendants, can more sharply experience the horror of those events, photographer Marina Amaral from Brazil, in collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, gives color to the preserved black and white photographs of concentration camp prisoners.

The collection of the memorial museum includes about 40 thousand registration photographs of prisoners. These surviving photographs are just a part of the extensive Nazi photographic archive destroyed during the camp evacuation in January 1945.

The Faces of Auschwitz project is being carried out by the Museum in collaboration with the master of photo retouching Marina Amaral and a special team of scientists, journalists and volunteers. This is a huge painstaking work in which dozens of people are involved, because each of the photographs painted by Marina is accompanied by a story about a separate life. The project participants consider this to be the best way to perpetuate the memory of victims of senseless fanaticism and hatred.

With the help of Marina's skill, the faces in old photos seem so lively and emotional that you want to cry. The girl herself missed this tragedy through herself. And although this is just one of her many projects to paint retro photographs of famous historical events, when asked to name just one thing in human history that she would like to change, Marina replies: "Prevent the Holocaust."

A prick in the heart

Ivan Rebalka was born in 1925 in Syrovatka (the territory of modern Ukraine). As a teenager, the boy worked as a milkman.

In August 1942, 17-year-old Ivan and another 56 of his fellow countrymen were deported to a concentration camp. He was registered as a Russian (Soviet) political prisoner and assigned the number 60308.

Vanya died six months later. The official cause of his death was a perirenal abscess, which was a lie: in fact, he was given a lethal injection of phenol into his heart. It is known that on March 1, 1943, Report-Fuehrer Gerhard Palich took more than 80 Polish, Jewish and Russian boys aged 13 to 17 from Birkenau to the main building of the hospital, all of them were placed in the camp hospital room and received a fatal phenol injection in the evening. Ivan, who was in the hospital on November 30, was among them.

The whole family was killed in the camps

Joseph Pater was born in 1897 in Zyrardow (at that time the city was part of the Russian Empire), later his family moved to the central part of Poland. Growing up, Josef joined the Polish Socialist Party. He dreamed of general rights for all citizens, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the creation of a progressive, democratic Poland.

Then there were studies in Krakow, and service in the squadron, and stay in an internment camp for the fact that in 1917 he refused to swear allegiance to Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, and again military service. Josef retired after receiving the Cross of Valor and the Cross of Independence with Swords from the government, two of the highest awards given to Polish soldiers.

When Nazi Germany began to occupy Poland, Josef took up arms again, leading the Resistance group. Arrest and Nazi torture soon followed, during which he heroically remained silent.

On April 18, 1942, Joseph, along with dozens of other captive Jews, was transported to Auschwitz, where he received prisoner number 31225. In July of the same year, he was killed by SS officers. His wife ended up in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp in Germany, where she was also killed. Joseph's two sons, as well as his older brother, were killed in the Majdanek concentration camp.

Before taking a photo, I wiped the blood off my face …

Polish girl Czeslaw Kwoka was born in 1928 in the village of Zloecka. She and her mother were Catholic, which was contrary to Nazi dogma. In occupied Europe, many Catholic priests and nuns were persecuted and sent to concentration camps, and ordinary believers were similarly arrested.

As an official charge, they were charged with political crimes and serving the interests of the Roman Catholic Church.

Cheslava was taken to a concentration camp at the age of 14, along with her mother, Katarzyna Kwoka, came to Auschwitz.

Two months later, their mother was killed, and a month later, the girl herself died. She, like many other teenagers, received a lethal injection into the heart.

The prisoner of the camp Wilhelm Brasse, who, at the behest of the administration, photographed the prisoners and all the medical experiments on them, later said in an interview that he remembered this girl very well. When she was brought to the camp, she was so scared that for a long time she could not understand what they wanted from her. This infuriated the Nazi warden, and she constantly beat the child with a stick.

Brasse engraved one piercing stroke in my memory: before Cheslava was put in front of the camera, she wiped tears and blood from a split lip.

Guinea pig

A large-scale campaign to evict Poles from targeted areas of occupied Poland, in order to subsequently populate these territories with ethnic Germans, lasted almost a year. During the period from November 1942 to March 1943, according to historical sources, the German police and military expelled 116 thousand Polish men and women from only one district of Zamosc. Mass deportations in the city of Zamosc (now the Lublin Voivodeship of Poland) were carried out by order of Heinrich Himmler.

Josefa Glazovska was registered in Auschwitz under number 26886. A 12-year-old rural girl was deported together with her mother Marianna, who was taken away two months later for transfer to block 25 (the so-called "death row"). Josefa's mom was killed in the gas chamber. The girl's father died on the way to the concentration camp, where he was taken separately from his wife and daughter.

In Auschwitz, pseudo-medical experiments were carried out on the orphan, as a result of which, presumably, she was infected with malaria or typhoid.

Similar experiments were carried out in many camps on a large scale - Nazi doctors used prisoners as guinea pigs. The involvement of numerous German doctors in criminal experiments on prisoners was a particularly radical example of the violation of medical ethics. For example, among the initiators of this transcendent horror were the chief doctor of the SS and police, Obergruppenführer Ernst Gravitz and Standartenführer, director of the Military Research Institute for Specialized Analytical Research Wolfram Sievers. These experiments were supported by the Waffen-SS Institute of Hygiene under the leadership of Joachim Mrugovsky, MD and professor of bacteriology at the University of Berlin.

The main goal of the experiments was to work to improve the health of German soldiers, as well as plans to improve the health of the nation in the post-war period (including demographic policy). In addition to experiments planned at the state level, many Nazi doctors performed experiments on prisoners on behalf of German pharmaceutical companies or medical institutes. In addition, some physicians did this out of personal interest or to advance their academic careers.

Josefa Glazovska is one of the few survivors. During the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, she, along with a group of other children, was transferred to a camp in Potulica, and soon she was liberated by Soviet troops.

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945 by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Soviet Army. At that time, about seven thousand prisoners remained within its walls, and almost all of the prisoners were either sick or dying.

Continuing the theme of concentration camp prisoners - an amazing story about how music helped the actress to keep herself and her son alive during the Holocaust