"Jewish girls stood before my eyes all the time ": Memories that haunted the photographer of Auschwitz until the end of his days

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

In August 1940 he was taken to Auschwitz. His fate was seemingly predetermined: to die in a concentration camp from the atrocities of the SS. However, fate prepared another role for this prisoner - to become a witness and documentary filmmaker of those terrible events. The son of a Polish and German, Wilhelm Brasse went down in history as a photographer of Auschwitz. How does it feel to record the torment of prisoners like you on film every day? Later he spoke about his feelings about this more than once …

The concentration camp needed a photographer

Wilhelm Brasse learned to photograph at his aunt's photo studio in Katowice. There the young man practiced. As noted by clients, he did it very well: in the pictures they came out natural, relaxed. And he communicated with visitors very courteously.

When the Nazis occupied the south of Poland, Wilhelm was in his early twenties. Healthy strong youths were very much needed by the German army. The SS demanded from Brasse, as well as from some of his compatriots, to swear allegiance to Hitler. He flatly refused. Wilhelm was beaten and sent to prison for several months. And when he was freed, he firmly decided to flee the country.

Wilhelm was captured while trying to cross the Polish-Hungarian border, after which he was sent to a concentration camp. And six months later, an unexpected turn occurred in the fate of the prisoner.

At Auschwitz, the Nazis noticed that he was fluent in German. When they found out that Wilhelm was a photographer, he was sent to the Auschwitz identification and forensic department. Brasse, along with four other prisoners who were also proficient in photography, were asked to take some photographs. Wilhelm easily coped with the task, moreover, he had experience working in a darkroom. Having noted this, the Nazis decided to assign him to the forensic department for photographing incoming prisoners. From that day on, he became essentially a staff photographer of Auschwitz.

After a while, Brasse was introduced to the camp doctor-sadist Joseph Mengele, who personally examined the newly arrived prisoners and selected "guinea pigs" from them. Mengele told the photographer that now he will also film medical experiments on people.

Brasse photographed the experiments of a German doctor, as well as operations to sterilize Jewish prisoners, which were carried out on the orders of the Nazis by a Jewish doctor (the same forced prisoner employee as Brasse). As a rule, women died as a result of such manipulations. “I knew that they would die, but at the time of shooting I could not tell them this,” the photographer lamented many years later, recalling his work.

Very often, Wilhelm had to take pictures of German officers, who were responsible for tens of thousands of lives. The SS men needed photographs for documents or simply personal photographs that they sent home to their wives. And each time the prisoner used to say to them: "Sit comfortably, relax, look at the camera at ease and remember your homeland." It was like it was happening in a photo studio. I wonder what words he found for the prisoners he photographed?

The fascists highly appreciated Brasse's work and sometimes gave him food and cigarettes. He didn't refuse.

For all the time he worked in the concentration camp, Brasse took tens of thousands of photographs - terrifying, shocking, beyond the understanding of a sane person. The prisoners walked in an endless stream. Every day Brasse took so many pictures that a special group of prisoners was formed to analyze the photographs. It is striking how pedantry and with what cynicism the sadists documented all their atrocities. But how did the photographer feel?

As Brasse later recalled, every time he took a photo, his heart sank. He was at the same time ashamed in front of these people, scared to death, and very sorry for them, and ashamed of the fact that imminent death awaited them, and he would finish his work and go to rest. But his feeling of fear of the fascists was just as strong: he did not dare to disobey them.

Could Brasset resign from this "position" and was he morally correct in agreeing to such a job? In fact, he had only one choice: to obey the orders of the fascists or to die. He chose the first. As a result, he left stories of thousands of documentary evidence of atrocious crimes and … suffered until the end of his days.

“The shots that I shot in Auschwitz constantly haunt me,” the photographer admitted to the press more than once after the war. It was especially hard for him to remember the shooting of one of the famous experiments of the Nazis on the use of "Cyclone-B", as a result of which at least eight hundred Poles and Russians were killed in the 11th block.

And he still could not forget the frightened face of a Polish girl with a bruise on her lip: Czeslava Kwoka died shortly after the photo was taken as a result of a fatal injection in the heart given to her by the camp doctor.

In January 1945, shortly before the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, the camp administration, foreseeing such an outcome, ordered Brass to burn all photographic materials. At his own peril and risk, he decided not to do this: he destroyed only a small part of the images, but kept the rest. “Before the eyes of the German chief, I set fire to the negatives, and when he left, I quickly filled them with water,” Brasse recalled many years later.

Now unique documents, indisputably confirming all the scale of crimes committed by the administration of the concentration camp, are kept in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum (Auschwitz-Birkenau).

Life after Auschwitz

The prisoner-photographer did not have a chance to see with his own eyes how our troops liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz: not long before that he was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. At the time when the Americans liberated the camp in May 1945, Brasset was in an extreme degree of exhaustion, only miraculously not dying of hunger.

After the war he got married and had children and grandchildren. Until the end of his days, the former concentration camp photographer lived in the Polish city of Zywiec.

At first, Brasse tried to return to his former profession, wanted to take portraits, but could no longer photograph. Brasset admitted that every time he looked through the viewfinder, pictures of the past appeared before his eyes - Jewish girls sentenced to painful death.

Hard memories did not leave Wilhelm Brasset until the end of his days. He died at 94, taking them with him.

By the way, a retoucher photographer from Brazil found her own way to preserve the memory of the victims of Auschwitz. Continuing the topic - Faces, looking at which, the heart contracts.