My store of wildlife photos has depleted to the point where I’m a bit worried. Please send in your good photos!
Today’s contributor is Joe Routon, who sent “street photos”—if photos of Auschwitz can be called that. Joe’s captions are indented:
These are some of the photos I made a few years ago in Auschwitz on a gloomy winter day. We felt a somber feeling of doom, similar to what the Jewish prisoners undoubtedly experienced. It must have been even more unbearable for them in the winter.
Gas chamber and crematorium.
The sign reads “Caution, high voltage, life risk.”
In one of the rooms there are over 100,000 shoes that belonged to people deported to Auschwitz for extermination. Other rooms contain children’s shoes, eyeglasses, and human hair, all removed before the victims were taken to the gas chamber.
In Budapest, Hungary, on the banks of the Danube, is a memorial sculpture “The Shoes on the Danube Promenade” with 60 pairs of men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes, all made of rusting iron. It is a monument to the Hungarian Jews who were shot on the banks of the river by the members of the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian fascist organization.
In 1944 and 1945, Arrow Cross militiamen beat, plundered, and killed thousands of Jews publicly in Budapest. They would line them up on the edge of the Danube and shoot them, with the bodies falling into the freezing water, which conveniently carried them away.
Before shooting them, they would force the Jews to remove their shoes, which could be sold or traded on the black market. During those days, the Danube was known as “the Jewish Cemetery.”
In Miami Beach, Florida, this 42-feet high bronze hand, reaching out in desperation, pleading for help, is a memorial to the Jews who suffered and were murdered during World War II. On the forearm are an Auschwitz number and 130 human figures writhing in agony, clinging together in the hope of survival.
Very nice, Joe! Thanks!
The double fence, barb wire, electrified, all concrete post. That is more security than I ever saw in the air force around nuclear weapons. Pure insanity.
Beautiful but grim photos.
Too much.
I got put in facebook jail for posting the first one – whilst pointing out why the phrase was anti-semitic…
The insanity of wokeness. Deny anything that makes anyone uncomfortable.
Everyone should feel uncomfortable looking at these images. It’s therapeutic and preventative.
We don’t at present know why it triggered Facebook jail. It could have been from a complaint from an old-school type of anti-semite. Still, it’s nuts.
Face book jail for those pictures. What idiots. And they just desplayed 46 minutes of the white house idiot lying on Facebook.
Excellent and profound pictures!
When I was quite young, I had some neighbors with the numbers tattooed on their forearms. I didn’t understand what they meant and didn’t ask. It wasn’t until several years later that I learned the horror of them. Yet, those people survived. I wonder if they told their stories to anyone.
Yes, I remember when I was very young we would go to Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles for deli food at Canter’s Restaurant. It was a very Jewish area. We would see many older people with tattoos and my mother getting very upset. I too did not understand the horror until much later.
Their stories must have been horrendous but I will never know the extent of each one. And maybe nobody will know their story.
Thank you for these very powerful photos-
A number of my neighbors had them too. I was quite young and will always remember my grandmother breaking down crying when I asked her why they had them. I think I stupidly asked if I could get one too. I was maybe six.
Both horrifying and poignant.
Growing up in East New York (part of Brooklyn) as a child in the ’50s I saw lots of people with numbers tattooed on their forearms. Didn’t really understand until I got a bit older, but my folks would get quite emotional about it especially when attending religious services where many of the survivors would come to pray. As I grew older, I could never understand why these refugees from the Nazi horror would still believe in any deity that was so evil as to allow mass murder. This helped push me to become a nonbeliever and ultimately an atheist.
Grisly. Always upsetting.
I have noticed lighting in winter that results in similar effects as here — it is such an interesting, powerful mood, at once the symmetry drawing me in, wrapping myself up in the mood, with an emptied, drained emotion, though somehow comforting but then unsettling – it is hard to describe. Something says to me “it’s over”, we have 20/20 hindsight — yet, we are never settled, or resolved… wow….
In winter (at least where I am at 45° north latitude), the sun never gets very high above the horizon, all day. This yields much more time in “magic hour” of light: Low angled light, strong back lighting, etc.
It is one of the reasons I enjoy(ed) traveling in Scotland. Wonderful light!
Very moving photos…I was picturing some of them like the smoke stack in the snow and the fence as B&W. I bet they’d be even more dramatic.
In the documentary World at War, a couple of the 20+ disc set covered the Holocaust. There was an interview with a gas chamber attendant (I think he was at Auschwitz) who described the grisly scene after the gas was dispensed and the screams stopped. He said it happened every time- there was a pyramid of dead bodies as they struggled to reach the ceiling vents. I can never get that image out of my head, and that sculpture of the hand with the climbing Holocaust victims brought the image right back. I found that photo ineffably powerful and it filled me with sorrow. Art doing it’s job.
Some five years ago, we took a Jewish history tour of Central Europe that was led by Stephan Berk, history professor at Union College, Schenectady, NY. The trip included visits to the camps at Theresianstad and Auschwitz. Berk pointed out the irony of the fact that the “Arbeit Macht Frei” phrase was created by liberal criminologists late in the 19th Century to instruct prisoners that the will be rehabilitated through good, hard work. It’s later use was a Nazi perversion. We also saw the shoe memorial along the Danube in Budapest. The Arrow Cross would tie two Jews together and shoot only one. The pair would then fall into the river.
We must Never Forget.
Thank you for posting this article.
Shira
Powerful images. The last gives me shivers.