Three Tearless Histories

by Erich Hackl

  Immediately after the defeat of Poland, the National Socialist authorities set about sorting out the population according to racial criteria. With that aim in view, all inhabitants of the annexed districts as well as in the so-called Government General had to be registered in the List of Racial Germans. Their application was checked and anyone who was not classified as a professed German, of German origin, Germanized, or at least re-Germanized, was faced with severe reprisals. Like his brothers, Wilhelm was not interested in being recognized as a residual German of class 1 to 4, he felt he was a Pole among Poles, even if he had never been ashamed of his Austrian origin, and he wanted to fight for Poland’s freedom. In the spring of 1940 he set off with a band of like-minded people to go abroad. Their goal was France, where General Sikorski was organizing the Polish armed forces in exile; they hoped to get there via Hungary. On March 8, in a village by Sanok, eight kilometers from the border, they were betrayed, surrounded and arrested. Brasse spent five months in a prison cell in Tarnów, then he was transferred to Auschwitz, along with 412 other prisoners. He can still say his prisoner’s number there—3444—in his sleep.

  Shortly before the train left, he and another Polish patriot with a German name, Adler, were taken before an officer.

  You have the choice. If you volunteer for the Wehrmacht, you’ll be released.

  No, said Brasse.

  No, said Adler, who was murdered in Auschwitz one month later.

  Brasse survived, in the first place by chance, just as every prisoner basically owed his continued existence to chance, in the second place because his profession was of use to the organization, and in the third place because he could speak German. In his section of the Records Department German had to be spoken, the SS officer Ernst Hofmann, previously a teacher in a small town in Saxony, had had a sign fixed there on which was written in clear, neat letters: ‘Anyone who gabbles in Polish is a traitor and will be treated as such.’

  From the very beginning the Records Department was headed by SS Oberscharführer (sergeant), later Hauptscharführer (sergeant-major) Bernhard Walter, who in the summer of 1944 was awarded a high decoration or some such cross of merit in recognition of his tireless participation in the selections on the unloading ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. According to Brasse, his behavior toward the prisoners under him was relatively decent, and when he was tried by a Polish court in 1948, the survivors of his section testified that he had treated them well, so that he was only sentenced to six years in prison. After his early release he settled in Fürth in Bavaria, where he worked as a projectionist, and it is presumably not going too far to assume that his years of service in the concentration camp were counted toward his pension.

  The section consisted of ten prisoners of whom, apart from Brasse, only Taudeusz Brodka, from a village to the north of Warsaw, and Bronisław Jureczek, who mainly worked in the dark room, had had a thorough grounding in their craft. Their foreman was a certain Franz Malz from Stettin, a simple village photographer in Brasse’s estimation. One of those who only take one exposure at a wedding because they don’t want to waste film, who don’t know anything about lighting and have never learnt to retouch a picture. As a communist Malz had immediately been arrested in 1933 and put in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz his mind or his survival instinct gradually went, perhaps he thought he was immortal after all those years in which death had spared him; he talked too much and what he said was dangerous.

  Franz, Brasse would say, you can tell me things like that, but not anyone else.

  For instance the dream in which he saw the whole of Germany fenced in with barbed wire and Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Höss and Himmler walking inside the wire, all in prisoner’s uniforms.

  Be careful, Franz.

  But Franz told his barbed-wire dream to the canteen supervisor, who immediately told others and soon afterward a messenger announced that Malz had to report to the Political Department at once. With that his fate was sealed, in the fall of forty-three.

  Brasse estimates that he took between 40,000 and 50,000 photos in Auschwitz, in the first two years almost exclusively of new arrivals, who were sent to him in the photographic studio straight after the reception formalities—head-shave, shower, clothes issue. Three photos of each, the first with cap on, looking up and to one side, the second without cap and from the front, the third in profile, for which the chair was turned by 90 degrees. The face of the person being portrayed had to be expressionless. The rate at which he was compelled to work and the frequent presence of an SS officer made any communication beyond brusque orders—Cap off. Look in front. Off you go. And the next.—difficult. If signs of maltreatment could be clearly seen, the photos were usually taken at a later date. The time the work took and its intensity depended on the frequency of the convoys. When the first mass convoy from France arrived in the camp with 1100 deportees, the section had to work through the night. Then there were times when he could fulfill private requests from the guards and civilian workers. Not police photos but portraits and private pictures of SS officers, alone or with their wives, six postcard-size pictures for three reichsmarks, normal passport photos for 1.50 reichsmarks. For example, a series of Maximilian Grabner, the feared head of the Political Department, for his relatives in Lower Danube Gau. The request was for particularly good pictures, Grabner was very demanding.

  Relax, Herr Unterscharführer, a little more to the left, now look at me. Yes, that’s it.

  Grabner was happy with the result. As was the young blonde, one of the so-called SS maidens who worked as telephonists and telegraphists. She wanted a half-length portrait and posed in a thin tulle blouse under which her breasts could be made out, then she even took her blouse off.

  For the family, as she explained to Brasse, it’s to be something different.

  After three or four days she came to collect the pictures. One week later she killed herself.

  Her place of work wasn’t far from the crematorium, Brasse says, opposite was the staff headquarters, on the other side the electrified barbed wire, she could see everything that was going on in the camp.

  There was also photographic work undertaken on irregular terms, in return for ‘charitable gifts’, as Brasse puts it: the SS officers paid in goods, which cost them nothing. These deals were done behind Walter’s back. Particularly useful was his relationship with Unterscharführer Franz Schebek from Vienna, who supervised the food store. First of all Schebek had ordinary passport photos taken, then a series of postcard-size ones; in both cases he thought they were exceptionally good photos of him, so he soon turned up with another commission: Brasse was to enlarge some family photos.

  Yes, but there’s stuff I need for that.

  What do you need?

  Bread for the developer. For the fixer margarine. For the paper—

  OK, that’s enough. You’ll get everything.

  Two cubes of margarine and two pieces of bread, that made you rich, Brasse says. Moreover I used to pinch things from the food store. Whenever I took a copy to Schebek, something disappeared. He said, I know you’re stealing but I just can’t catch you. That meant that none of the ten men in my section had to go hungry.

  One of them was a Jew, but only Brasse and Brodka knew that. The former had brought him into the section at the request of the latter simply by going to the boss: Beg to report, Herr Oberscharführer, we’re behind with our work, we urgently need a specialist and I know of someone… Granted. The specialist was called Eduard Josefsberg. He’d worked in a photo shop in Lvov and after the war broke out had managed to acquire false papers that identified him as Aryan. When they went for a shower, which was at least two or three times a week because they were careful about hygiene in the Records Department, Brasse and Brodka kept him between them, for he was circumcised and none of the SS should see that.

  Fifty-two years after the liberation there was a reunion of the three camp photographers, in Sweden, where the two others has settled. Brasse had visited Brodka, who had told Josefsberg
, and they spent a lovely evening together. Two days later Josephsberg’s wife called Brodka, moaning and begging him to leave her husband in peace; he was ripe for the nut-house, she said, it must be because they’d been talking about Auschwitz until late into the night, since then he’d been driveling on and on that he’d betrayed the Jews there and wasn’t fit to go on living. Eduard Josefsberg, who called himself Kowalski in Malmö and probably died long ago.

  Brasse could have coped with the daily routine. The countless police photos. Cap off, look straight ahead, turn left, etc. But they, not counting the private ones, were not the only photographs demanded of him. Soon after the first mass convoys of Jews had arrived in Auschwitz he was forced to record the pseudo-medical experiments of the SS doctors Josef Mengele and Eduard Wirths in pictures. Wirths, who had taken it into his head to develop a method of early diagnosis of cancer of the cervix, even had a gynecological chair brought into the studio, in which women were compelled to undergo colposcopical investigations. The camera was lurking between the stirrups and behind it Brasse’s eye. Mengele, on the other hand, was after people of restricted growth—brothers and sisters, sets of twins, children—whom he subjected to terrible mutilations. The third, Friedrich Entress, had a pathological passion for unusual tattoos, which he cut out of his victims’ bodies and kept in an album; but first of all Brasse had to photograph them on the person while they were still alive. Johannes Kramer, fourthly, wanted to have all the phases of starvation documented; he would send emaciated prisoners to Brasse, who knew that immediately afterward they would be killed with an injection of poison.

  Sometimes he tried to delay their death. In such cases he would claim that the photos hadn’t come out satisfactorily and had to be done again. On the other hand he sometimes tried to shorten their sufferings, because they were beyond help anyway. For example, two of his neighbors from Żywiec called Enoch and Wachsberger (Wachsberger had kept the inn on the station square), who were getting weaker and weaker by the day, even though he had for a long time made an effort to feed them. When it became clear to him that they were lost, he asked a prisoner from Block II, a killer called Wacław Rudzki, who was as accomplished as he was nasty, to bring their lives to a swift, painless end. By a blow with the edge of the hand on the carotid artery or a sudden twist of the head, a broken neck.

  In the camp, Brasse says, no one died, they all just perished like animals.

  And he adds a phrase that he weaves in at the most impossible points, but here it’s in the right place: That’s what things were like.

  There is one of Brasse’s photos that has gone all around the world. Everyone who has dealt, however superficially, with Auschwitz and the extermination of people and the Nazi regime knows it. It shows four Jewish girls, naked, emaciated until they’re nothing more than skeletons, looking at us with big eyes. Four thirteen-year-olds who are shortly about to die and are immensely ashamed of their nakedness, before each other and before the man looking at them through the camera. Brasse says he attempted to help them overcome their shame, which weighs on him like a reproach, he kept his distance, in order by that very means to be close to them, he spoke to them tenderly, gave them a piece of bread, that they grasped greedily and devoured.

  That was the moment when I cursed God. And my mother for having given birth to me.

  It was this picture above all that appeared to him after the liberation whenever he looked through his viewfinder. Until he finally put his camera away forever.

  One day in January 1945 an agitated Hauptscharführer Walter dashed into the room.

  Brasse, Jureczek, quick, the Russkis are coming, burn all the photos at once. Prints, negatives, index cards—into the stove with them.

  Brasse obeyed. He opened the first drawer, took out several packets and threw them into the stove. But they wouldn’t burn. It turned out that the German firms were already delivering negatives of non-combustible material. Walter, horrified, started to poke the fire; after five or ten minutes he ran off, at which Brasse pulled the scorched negatives out of the stove and poured water over them.

  I managed to save that lot. About three-quarters of the material has been preserved. Part of it was later found in other camps. How did it get there?

  On January 21 Brasse left the camp with the last evacuation convoy. They had to do the first 52 miles on foot, then they were loaded into open freight cars. Brasse had taken his precautions: he had his own prisoner’s photo with him and also the pictures of his uncle, one of his mother’s brothers who had been gassed in the camp after he’d survived the typhus epidemic, during which Brasse himself almost died; he’d already been dragged, naked, out of the sick bay but his boss had gone to see Entress, the camp doctor, personally: I need Brasse, you’re to make him better. So he had the three photos of his uncle as well as an Agfa movie camera and a Zeiss Extra camera. As the train to Mauthausen crossed the bridge over the Danube, he threw everything in the water.

  If they’d found that on me, I’d have been killed at once.

  In Mauthausen Brasse spent a week or ten days in the quarantine block, then he was sent to the outer camp at Melk, in the former stables of the monastery where, in the open air and at freezing temperatures, he had to work for the firm of Stiegler & Russ digging ditches and holes, erecting fences and huts to house the new mass convoys of prisoners, who were dropping like flies. From one particular spot in the camp a small piece of the Danube could be seen. He could feel he was getting weaker every day. On April 14 or 15 he was transported again, to Ebensee and then on to Attnang-Puchheim for clearing-up operations because the station had been bombed shortly beforehand. He fell ill with gastric fever, only weighed 90 lbs. when he was five-foot-nine tall; gradually he got used to the idea that he was going to die. But on May 6 he was liberated by the Americans, who took him to Lambach, to recover in a military hospital.

  There was the possibility of emigrating to the USA. For anyone who could show that they had relatives in the United States the crossing was free. Brasse remembered that a sister of his mother had gone there before the war, but he wasn’t attracted by the idea of following her. His whole being was set on a return to Poland. In Auschwitz he’d had the opportunity to have a look at his file in the camp commander’s office. There was a note in it that an aunt, who had married into the family on his father’s side, a real Pole-basher, as Brasse said, had made very unfriendly comments about him to the police: “As a fanatical Pole it will be better if he stays in the camp until the end of the war.” For that and other offenses she was sentenced to six years in prison after the war. Later she emigrated to the Federal Republic. And her nephew set off for Poland on July 10, 1945.

  I wanted to go back to my profession. Work as a photographer again. But there was the memory of the photos, above all the one of the four girls.

  In Żywiec he became friendly with a young woman he’d known from before the war, their friendship turned into love and their love produced two children. He told his son about what he had experienced and seen in the camps, he traveled around Austria with him, as far as the Swiss border and back, through the former places of suffering, the delightful surroundings of which he could now enjoy: Melk, the imposing monastery, the Wachau, the Salzkammergut, Ebensee, the view of the rocks in Lake Traunsee. His daughter knows about this as well, of course. But he didn’t go into the details with her. The sufferings of the children, of the girls, of the young women in the camp brothel whom he also had to photograph. By chance he saw one of them again in Warsaw, in the streetcar; he was going to go over to her and say hello but she gave him a sign: keep away from me, don’t talk to me.

  When it became clear that it was all over with photography for him, he looked around for another profession, a way of earning a living that under no circumstances would place him in a moral dilemma ever again. An occupation that was so ordinary that the question of the relationship between innocence and involvement would never arise. Together with his wife he began producing artificial skins for sausages.
They made, as he says, a pretty good living out of it.

  THE ONLY CHEERFUL PHOTO from Auschwitz, with a promise of happiness, has stayed with me for fifteen years. Wilhelm Brasse took it in the Records Department on the morning of March 18, 1944, after the civil wedding of the Austrian, Rudi Friemel, who was under preventive detention, and the Spaniard Margarita Ferrer, who on this occasion was allowed to stay in the camp for one day and one night, accompanied by their child, who was three years old. I found prints of this photo in Vienna, Madrid and Paris. The description of these events in a posthumously published sketch by Margarita suggested the photographer was a prisoner from Vienna who had long since died. That is what it says in my story about The Wedding in Auschwitz, which was published just four years ago. I have only heard about Brasse now, with the appearance of the Polish edition, but in reality our acquaintance is a result of the invisible threads running through places and times:

  On May 19, 1944, the Ovici family arrived in Auschwitz in a train-load of Hungarian Jews. They were ten brothers and sisters who came from Transylvania and had appeared in concert halls and vaudeville theaters in Budapest. Seven of them, all of restricted growth, performed songs and sketches under the name of Trupa liliput, while the rest, two women and one man, played klezmer music. These three were no different than other people, apart from the fact that they had short arms and legs like their brothers and sisters. But precisely that was what aroused Mengele’s interest. He subjected them to a series of experiments, the effects of which Brasse had to record with the camera.