Group of covert photographs by an inmate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp
No. 280, framed by the gas chamber's doorway or window
No. 280 cropped
No. 281
No. 281 cropped and retouched
No. 282: women being taken to the gas chamber
No. 282 cropped
No. 283: Trees near the gas chamber, taken shortly after No. 282. The photographer, shooting from the hip, aimed the camera too high
The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.[1] Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.[a]
The images were taken within 15–30 minutes of each other by an inmate inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp within the Auschwitz complex. Usually named only as Alex, a Jewish prisoner from Greece, the photographer was a member of the Sonderkommando, inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers.[b] Several sources identified him as Alberto Errera, a Greek military officer.[4] He took two shots from inside one of the gas chambers and two outside, shooting from the hip, unable to aim the camera with any precision. The Polish resistance smuggled the film out of the camp in a toothpaste tube.[5]
The photographs were numbered 280–283 by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[6] Nos. 280 and 281 show the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, shot through the black frame of the gas chamber's doorway or window. No. 282 shows a group of naked women just before they enter the gas chamber. No. 283 is an image of trees, the result of the photographer aiming too high.[7]
In 2014, Gerhard Richter transferred the photographs onto four canvases - one for each photo - and painted over them to create his cycle of paintings titled Birkenau.
^Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. First published as Images malgré tout, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003.
^Franziska Reiniger, "Inside the Epicenter of the Horror—Photographs of the Sonderkommando", Yad Vashem, undated.
^Didi-Huberman 2008, 11.
^Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, 375, n. 2.
Dan Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006, 16.
Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 95.
Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013, 90ff.
^Cite error: The named reference DH2008p16 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Dan Stone, "The Sonderkommando Photographs," Jewish Social Studies, 7(3), Spring/Summer 2001, (132–148), 143, n. 3. JSTOR 4467613
^Didi-Huberman 2008, 117.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
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