Photography has long played an instrumental role in preserving moments — some mundane, some good, and others downright horrific. Afrom Auschwitz fits squarely in the latter group, although not in the way one might expect.
The photo album was plucked from a trash bin in a German apartment by a United States counterintelligence officer in 1946 while he was hunting Nazi war criminals. He held onto it for decades before sending it anonymously to Rebecca Erbelding, a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist, in 2007. The idea that Nazis lit a Christmas tree while millions of people, mostly European Jews but also non-Jewish Poles, Romani, and Soviet prisoners of war,is jarring. In powerful ways, images like these can prove more disturbing than ones showing explicit violence.
“The album reminds us that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings, men and women with families, children and pets, who celebrated holidays and took vacations… These people were human beings… and these photographs remind us what human beings are capable of when they succumb to anti-Semitism, racism and hatred,” Erbelding said in aThe full extent of the role Höcker played was not known until the album appeared, so the “crucial cog in the Nazi killing machine,” as Erbelding...
Höcker’s scrapbook may be a chilling treasure trove for historians, but it means something different for Irene Weiss, who arrived at Auschwitz one day after Höcker. Weiss was there for a very different reason, as the 13-year-old Hungarian Jew arrived at the camp on one of the infamous trains and soon lived an unimaginable nightmare.
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