Reading Didi-Huberman’s book ‘Images in spite of All’ illuminated the atrocities of Auschwitz from a completely new perspective. The war crimes well documented in the concentration camp in writing become transmuted visually for the viewer through the simple photograph. The essence of description is one that can be detailed through many mediums, yet, there is in my opinion a definite distinction that Huberman highlights where the photograph, compared to a written description, has a much bigger and more disturbing impact on the viewer. This is most apt for the four photographs from Auschwitz. Huberman describes the images with ‘it is troubling that a desire to snatch an image should materialize at the most indescribable moment, as it is often characterized of the massacre of the Jews: the moment when those who assisted, stupefied, had room left for neither thought nor imagination. Time, space, gaze, thought, pathos-everything was obfuscated by the machinelike enormity of the violence produced.’ The selective language Huberman uses is extremely thought-provoking and a cause for analysis; the fact that the photograph of the naked women being led to the gas chamber has to be snatched from reality for it to be real for the outside world separate from the purgatorial existence of the camp is a testament to the power of the photograph. As was said in the film, many people would not believe the atrocities of the camp, as they could not rationally accept them as being real- the massacre of millions of innocent people was a concept too fantastic for consideration. And yet, it is only the photographs that are able to show us the truth. Huberman says that ‘whatever the cost, form had to be given to this unimaginable reality.’ Escape and revolt were near impossible- everyone in the camps was on a limited clock, death was inescapable it was just a matter of when, and if death did not come upon an individual by intention, most likely starvation, disease and lastly suicide, would. The only way the prisoners could tell their story, send a cry for help, and even stretch out a gesture of humanity to those they ushered into the gas chambers was through ‘the sending of an image, of information.’
When we talk about Auschwitz one must remember the fundamental concept surrounding the death camp was the ‘final solution’, the extermination, the eradication but, above all, the obliteration was a secret. The world created by the Nazis in the compound was one that was supposed to be separate from our world; this is thus why these 4 photographs are so important, they are the only source of visual information that breakdown years of secrecy involving the murder of millions of people. Huberman writes that ‘the four photographs from Auschwitz by members of the Sonderkommando were also, therefore, four refutations snatched from a world that the Nazis wanted to obfuscate, to leave wordless and imageless.’ The images that we see, conducted hastily with fear of execution if the photographer is caught, smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste were of such heavy life-threatening importance that their very existence could expose genocide of unimaginable historical capacity. ‘Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power. For this reason, photography was as difficult to eradicate in Auschwitz as was memory in the bodies of the prisoners.’ In my own personal experiences of war and trauma, I believe this as to be completely accurate. My Polish grandmother suffered the experience of a concentration camp in Siberia when she was twelve years old. Through stories told to me when I was young and she was still alive I would hear of how it was so cold in the trains that some girls never got their period and could never have children, and how my grandmother would wait for people around her to die so that she could take their coat out of pure survival instinct. Stories give a personal insight to an event, but it is completely different when that event is shown to you visually. Watching the screening gave me an understanding and implemented a shock factor I was unable to grasp through the reading alone. Watching the corpses being flung into the pits, no longer human the flesh was so tight around the bones, the faces faceless without their hair and gaunt to the point that it were as if they were already skeletons, midway between this world and the next, deeply, deeply disturbed me.
Even breaking from the physical concept of image, is the metaphorical concept of it, one that Huberman finds incredibly potent. The image of man is reflected in the things he creates, almost to the point of being a biblical reference as with God himself creating man. We may see the Pyramids, the Acropolis, and feel great pride; yet, we must place beside them the image of the gas chambers, and the mountains of dead in unison. The disfiguration, the cruelty, the torture is all man’s doing and therefore an image of man. This is an idea I found remarkably perturbing because, in effect, it’s true. The clandestine images of those women, stripped of their humanity by ways of their clothes and hair and treated like animals thrown to the slaughter shows the extent of what one human is capable of doing to another. Despite they are shot out of focus, jagged and taken ‘from the paradoxical threshold of an interior (the chamber of death, which preserves, at that very moment, the life of the photographer) and of an exterior (the gruesome incineration of the victims that have just been gassed’ they show beyond all, the image of human sadistic nature, put quite eloquently by the prisoner who scratched on the walls of his prison cell with his fingernails the famous inscription over Dante’s gates of hell. And that is what those images show, the image of a mortal hell.
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