Auschwitz by Stephen Burrows
Auschwitz in the snow as the debate whether the site should be kept in its time locked state or left to nature is being considered.
Website: Stephen Burrows
27 thoughts on “stephen burrows – auschwitz”
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Not the usual perspective, from the railway tracks, but still recognizable. I like the snow, although, winter must have been hell there. As for the debate: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it: it should stand and everyone who can go should go. It should be mandatory for every aspiring politician to go there.
Thanks for the reminder Stephen,
Mike.
Every year, middle and highschool children are brought, by train, from various Italian cities, to Auschwitz, as part of their history education. In my opinion a necessary thing to do. ‘To read’ is different from ‘to see’.
along with mike i was perhaps expecting to see the rail tracks..
the most disturbing element i remember seeing there was graffiti covering the walls and bed posts of the dorms.
a truly horrific place which this photograph brings across for me.. one of the most awful places and photographed at a time when people do not imagine it – winter – lends it the vibe of a chill in the air.. something it has all year round..
best
david
Interesting… I’ve always been drawn to visit and photograph Auschwitz. Not sure what it is… the energy of it I suppose or the end all be all-ness of it or maybe a past life.
I did visit Dachau when I was younger (1982). Strange experience, not just the history of the place but especially the greasy pair of bikers (I mean the Hells Angel types) who had swastikas on their denim and walked around laughing at the photographs. Disturbing, and why this history should never go away or be forgotten.
I did photograph at Toul Sleng, the Khmer Rouge schoolhouse prison in Phnom Penh. Insane energy in that place. One really feels it. Hard to describe. My guide wouldn’t accompany me in because his father went in and never came out (only one person out of thousands actually survived). I would imagine the energy is the same at Auschwitz. I saw Peter Matthieson give a talk once about a Buddhist retreat he did there. He saw ghosts – I believe him.
This photo makes me think of Primo Levis book. Imagine surviving weather such as this. We can’t even go there.
ironically, i thought of Frank’s great photo of the car headlights….for me, it’s the car, the headlights, the slick black tongue of the road and the snow falling, and the vertical composition, that make the photograph haunted….
and that extraordinary horizontal wire that nooses and cleaves the photograph in half…..
nothing more i wish to add
“.. Imagine surviving weather such as this. We can’t even go there…”
“…the car headlights….for me, it’s the car, the headlights, the slick black tongue of the road and the snow falling, and the vertical composition, that make the photograph haunted….”
Charles, Bob…. yes, i didnt see the doomed Auschwitz in this photo and im glad…
Not that i wanted to “see” it either…
but i got the “feeling”… i “felt” this photo… and thats enough for me..
Loves it!
The car spoils it for me. I think its there to DATE the picture [could be wrong, often am] but if this is its purpose, to serve as a symbol, then, for me, it is too obvious and adds nothing visually. If on the other hand it just happened to be in the frame, then so be it. But then it jars even more, again, to my eye.
I know the whole camp thing is emotive, and the question of ‘how do I shoot this thing?’ must be tough as hell[meaning I have NO IDEA how I would possibly approach this], but at the end of the day its an image and we must all call them as we see them, as they are presented.
Peace
John
John :)))
that’s an interesting observation…as Im looking now at the pic on a different computer (at school, on my way out of here) and i notice the car…it appears to be like a Volkswagen or Lada…i can see it more clearly now…i still LOVE the headlights…it creates this sad, strange, sense of doom for me, visually and emotionally (like out of a wwii flick) and of course i make the visual and emotional connection to the famous pic of Robert Frank’s…the car headlines…but, you are right…the car (which looks now more modern on this screen)looks weird, i guess the first time i looked (on a different monitor) the car looked ambiguous, almost outdated…the tones were so black that i couldnt make it’s definition…and thus: the headlights….but, yea, now that i look at a ‘clearer” monitor…i still love the headlights, but i wish the car’s modernity wasnt so obvious…
but that wire running horizontal just is so powerful….more than wire that gets me….
cheers
bob
John :)))
that’s an interesting observation…as Im looking now at the pic on a different computer (at school, on my way out of here) and i notice the car…it appears to be like a Volkswagen or Lada…i can see it more clearly now…i still LOVE the headlights…it creates this sad, strange, sense of doom for me, visually and emotionally (like out of a wwii flick) and of course i make the visual and emotional connection to the famous pic of Robert Frank’s…the car headlines…but, you are right…the car (which looks now more modern on this screen)looks weird, i guess the first time i looked (on a different monitor) the car looked ambiguous, almost outdated…the tones were so black that i couldnt make it’s definition…and thus: the headlights….but, yea, now that i look at a ‘clearer” monitor…i still love the headlights, but i wish the car’s modernity wasnt so obvious…
but that wire running horizontal just is so powerful….more than wire that gets me….
cheers
bob
Well, today I just wanted to have a quick glance at burn, but I feel the urge to write now.
First of all thank you to Stephen for this photograph and thanks to DAH for showing it. The image has something that reminds me of the past, the atrocities of Ausschwitz and at the same time with the car, this picture brings me to the present.
With this image you have reminded me of a dark chapter in world history, in the history of Germany, the history of my country. And this picture is still important today, because history repeats itself and unfortunately mankind does the most stupid mistakes again and again. We still kill each other for some stupid, silly, ignorant reasons!
Ausschwitz is perhaps the most well known place for what the Nazis did to more than a million Jews. It is a reminder for everyone not to forget what had happened. Personally I have never been there, but only 3 kilometers away from where I live a Jewish woman was killed by the Nazis, her name is Franziska Spiegel. She had to die because she was a Jew. Today a stone and a plate at the site where she was killed remind us of what has happened. There are many places like this and people today still remember what has happened.
It is important to face history and not ignore it. At school I spent more than half a year with learning about WWII. None of my family have been Nazis. My ancesters are from Poland, Ireland, Holland and Germany. And my grandfather was a miller and he traded flour to Jewish people at the time of the Nazi regime. It was dangerous to do and they had to do it secretly. This courage of my great grandfather still makes me proud today. Okay this is history, but history can become very real. When I did my photo work about Roma (the Roma and Sinti were also killed by the Nazis in camps like Ausschwitz) in Hungary a few years ago I met the grandmother of one of my Roma friends. It was love at first sight! Despite language difficulties we always enjoyed to meet and I spent a lot of time at her house. In her modest home she cooked for the entire family on Sundays and I had to come and join in. One day she said that when she was a young girl at the age of nine she was on a train to Austria, to a camp. Luckily she was able to flee and survive. She had tears in her eyes when she told me the story and I had no words to say, except a big hug. Uhhhh, that was a really, really weird moment and certainly a monent when I wished not to be a German. I still visit her every time I am in Hungary. She is one of the most wondeful people I ever met!
So, this is my little personal story at the side. What I have learned from all this and what I hope we will all learn is: war is completly useless. Even a single person dead is one person too many. We should find better ways to solve our differences and learn to be more tolerant and show more respect for the other. And learn to forgive, even when it is very difficult.
Peace!
Reimar
Eva, yes…
im glad that italian schools send their students to visit Auschwitz…
Do not forget that Mussolini was Hitler’s “brother”…
What happened in nazi germany also happened in fascist italy…
Many holocaust survivors can verify that truth…
Reimar thank you for the story…
NOT EVERY GERMAN was a nazi, & NOT EVERY ITALIAN was a fascist…
Same with America today… I’m American myself and trust me…
NOT EVERY AMERICAN supported Bush’s INVASION…
NOT EVERY AMERICAN HATES the Muslim’s…. not every American supported the war…
not every american accepts Quantanamo or Abu Ghraib…
Be proud to be German… In fact how many of us LEICA LOVERS KNOW THAT the Leica owners SAVED THE LIVES OF THOUSANDS JEWS BY sending them to America secretly with boats..
Viva Leica, Viva Solms, Viva Germany…
wow, the comments today under both photos are superb as are the photos themselves. In fact i can hardly imagine these photos without the wealth of words hanging on to their pixels. i am reading the comments one after the other, a veritable tumbling stream of words and accents through my mind, playing like music, expressing so many points of view, so many cultural facets, so much emotion, annecdotes and strong feeling..i want to thank both Chiara and Stephen and DAH for such a moving Internet experience..this IS the net at its best..visual, warm, spreading cultural understanding and building human relationships beyond borders in spite of governments and religions…BURN ES MUY PURA VIDA!!!
kat-
Brasil de Mora, Costa Rica
and ALL…
just for me to lighten up a little bit… did you know that :
Oskar Barnack (November 1, 1879 – January 16, 1936) was a German precision mechanic and industrial designer.
Between 1913 and 1914 he was head of development of the camera company Leitz in Wetzlar, Hesse, Germany. He was the driving force behind the making of the first mass-marketed 35mm camera. Barnack suffered from ((((((asthma))))))))), and sought to reduce the size and weight of cameras and supporting equipment used for outdoor photography.
so… ASTHMA is the reason behind the small leica design…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Barnack
… so if Oscar B. was asthmatic therefore the small leica design…
then i guess Ansel Adams was a bodybuilder , thats why he loved Large Format….
laughing!
I was going to write something, but then I remembered something I saw on television years ago and went looking for that instead. There are copyright issues so I can’t post the actual program, but here are the opening and closing bits of narration for Death’s Head Revisted, a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone.
Opening Narration:
” Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich, a picturesque, delightful little spot onetime known for its scenery but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp – for once, some seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former S.S. Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Twilight Zone.”
At the end of the program, and I will not give away the ending, a doctor looks around the camp and asks, “Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?”
Closing Narration:
“There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
Rod Serling could be purple, pompous, and portentous in the extreme, but in this case, he is exactly right.
These places in history are important to maintain of course. Memory is fugitive. Memorials last a bit longer but in the end will disappear as well. So how do you maintain them, transmit the reason they are there to the next generation? Leave as is and let time destroy them? Or repair them to withstand time and by doing so inevitably alter their message? I don’t know…
Tuol Sleng is one of those places: a school turned into S21 by the Kmer Rouge regime, an interrogation center (one of several) where about 15000 people died. It is the only place, together with Chhoeung Ek, where Cambodian schoolchildren can learn about their parent’s past (the years between ’75 and ’79 are not taught at school, and most of the parents don’t talk about these years out of fear of reviving painfull memories). About 50% of the kids under 20 don’t know what happened!
The first time I “visited” (how can you “visit” a place like that anyhow?) there was a crudeness and naiveté about the place which was truly overwhelming. Since then the pictures are protected by glass. The busts of Pol Pot are put into a cage so that people cannot vent their anger by kicking at them. The map of Cambodia made of skulls was dismantled. Still the place keeps some of its evocational powers. But it is dimmed somehow.
I seem to be digressing a bit, but here is what I wanted to say about those memorials for the dead: when you are a child of those who died there and if you think only about your parents as being dead, then where do you come from? What is your filiation? Who are you?
Regarding those issues of memory I recommend the reading of a 2-part interview of Richard Rechtman, psychiatrist and anthopologist:
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-cambodian-refugees-anthropologist-psychiatrist-trauma-bophana-090205.html
and
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-refugees-cambodian-anthropologist-psychiatry-trial-testimony-090206.html
Definitely agree with the poetic eloquence of Bob Black that the “extraordinary horizontal wire that nooses and cleaves the photograph in half…..” Certainly an (appropriately) gloomy take on a dreadful and fatal place…The sky is overcast…its clouds setting free the snow and eyeing the edifice with a smirk of disdain and sorrow beneath a murky sheath…there is no light here…only the artificial light emanating from the car’s headlights…perhaps this was the point that Stephen was trying to make…
An abstract and representational interpretation could also be that the drifting snow represents all the souls sacrificed here…lost and meandering, encircling this graveyard of million-plus innocent people, as if each snowflake represents one those senselessly murdered…It blows my mind that there are ignorant people running around this planet claiming that the Holocaust never happened. As Reimar Ott said, “It is a reminder for everyone not to forget what had happened.” Thank you, Stephen Burrows, for sharing this haunted image.
I have never been to Auschwitz or any of the other other concentration camps, however my experience does extend to something similar…a place of hiding…a young girl and her family trapped in secret rooms in their house during the German occupation of the Netherlands…I am speaking of my only experience visiting somewhere historical where persecution of the Jews occurred… the Anne Frank House…
Upon arrival, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect…I had seen centuries old houses where I grew up having secret hideouts to shelter those seeking safe haven during the underground railroad, which was amazing to see, history from the 19th century in the floor of my friend’s living room…a secret hatch, a refuge from cowardly abolitionists…Only, there was no line to see part of the freedom trail that my friend proudly boasted was part of her house…she simply lifted the rug to reveal the secret. At the Anne Frank House, there was a huge line wrapping around the corner. People were chatting in line and looking around, seeming nonchalant on a sunny day in Amsterdam about 12 years ago. I was about 19 and unsure what was about to hit me. As soon as the line tucked inside, all talk ceased and silence took over…not at anyone’s urging, but out of a cumulative respect for what the place was and what it stood for. Then I could see the doorway to this housebound prison, one that would ensure freedom if secrets were kept and patience kept on an even keel… the bookcase, simply opened seemingly on hinges from the wall…I could see the stairs and how they extended upward beyond this bookcase of blue hue…and once beyond it, I broke the plane from obvious house to hidden house…beyond the bookcase doorway, I traveled with heavy feet up those stairs, and the silence was simply deafening. The place was packed with tourists, and I could only hear the drone of a TV in one of the rooms playing footage of the Holocaust. I wandered between rooms, and observed with a heavy heart. It looked as though they still lived there…I know this is due to good preservation and upkeep by those who care for the house, but still…I walked right into history and it slapped me in the face. I looked around the other observers, but only for a moment…I was too intently feeling the effects of the energy of the place. I felt heavy-hearted, and when I left, and I cried.
It is so important to preserve these images and places and recordings of our history. This is not just history for the Jews or the Germans or the Dutch or Polish or anyone of any race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, etc…it is HUMAN history, and it needs to be learned and passed on. We are all in this together and we need to enlighten those who travel in the dark…thanks for reading…
correction on the 3rd paragraph of my comment…I meant to say that “my experience does extend to something related” (not similar)…
correction on my comment, third paragraph, I meant to write that “my experience does extend to something related” (not similar)…
Oh rats, I wrote a long post here, submitted it and it just disappeared…
So, here again, but shorter.
Basically it was about this: if you think only about the dead being dead and not about their life before their death, then where do you come from? How come you’re there? Who are you? What is your filiation?
I recommend you read this 2-part interview by Ka-set .info of Richard Rechtman, psychiatrist and anthropologist here:
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-cambodian-refugees-anthropologist-psychiatrist-trauma-bophana-090205.html
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-refugees-cambodian-anthropologist-psychiatry-trial-testimony-090206.html
I cannot sleep – looked around the web and found an article by Robert Fisk in The Independent which is strangely related to both images shown today
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-examine-the-popes-words-and-theres-only-one-thing-to-conclude-1634266.html
Best
Reimar
Seems Burn doesn’t like links very much…
My second post didn’t show up either…
Tired of repeating the same things. Please read the 2-part Richard Rechtman interview on the Ka-set.info website…
Basically it was about this, related to memorials: if you think only about the dead being dead and not about their life before their death, then where do you come from? How come you’re there? Who are you? What is your filiation?
Part one is here:
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-cambodian-refugees-anthropologist-psychiatrist-trauma-bophana-090205.html
Part two is here:
http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/news-richard-rechtman-refugees-cambodian-anthropologist-psychiatry-trial-testimony-090206.html
ALL
please head over to the “dialogue” post titled “times and timing…” for further commenting… we’re bringing the discussion over to one place…
thank you
Firstly, apologies for the delay in replying to the posts, also thank you to Burn and DAH for publishing my photograph, it seems a special privilege to be included in a journal of this quality dedicated to the medium I am obsessed with. I was worn out when I took the photo at Auschwitz. I had walked round the camp in cold clear light and had got back on the coach when the snow came in. The photo was taken from the coach window just before it left for Krakow. I think John is correct in saying that the car is in the frame to date the picture. I wanted this to be a record of the slice of time in which I was present, not an attempt to recreate a moment from 60 odd years ago. Bob’s observation about Robert Frank is also accurate although I cannot honestly if it was conscious or unconscious, I probably reach for these references instinctively.
I am heartened to read the responses to the photo. I agonized about going to Auschwitz when I was in Krakow. I couldn’t bear the way it was marketed as a day-trip like a visit to Stonehenge. I also remember reading about George Rodger who, after photographing the aftermath of the liberation of Belsen, said he would never again make beautiful compositions in such a place. But Rodger had a serious journalistic purpose in being there, he wasn’t burdened by the thought that he might be simply engaging in cheap grief tourism. I am glad now that I took this photograph, using what skills I have to produce a tiny tiny reminder of that dismal place. My understanding is that the physical structure of the camp is in danger of disintegrating through age. If it does disappear then, at some stage, only the photographs will remain.
Steve