F.F.D.J.F.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it is certainly true that of all the many books I have read on the Holocaust, none ever effected me quite as The Auschwitz Album did. Discovered by concentration camp survivor Lili Jacob (now Meier) in the abandoned German barracks of the Dora (Mittelbau-Dora) slave labor camp after liberation, this "scrapbook" offers a visual chronicle of the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

Any photographs you may have seen, of Jews "disembarking" at Auschwitz, being "sorted" by SS officers, or marching off in various lines, undoubtedly comes from this album, which is unique among Holocaust documents. As Peter Hellman explains in his brief textual introduction (in which he also sketches Lili Meier's life story), it was SS policy not to photograph the Jewish victims of Auschwitz, making these 188 photographs the only ones ever taken of the millions of souls who passed through that place of horrors, most never to reemerge.

It is unclear why an exception was made for this project, what purpose the photographs were meant to serve, or who took them. Here are no scenes of overt violence, no starved or mutilated bodies, no gas chambers, no crematoria. Just the dazed and bewildered faces of people emerging from dark cattle cars; the chaos of the train platform, on which the men and women were herded into separate lines; the "selection" process, in which a flick of the finger meant either life or death; and the march, either towards slave labor, or the gas chamber.

Here are the faces of women and men - young and old, healthy or infirm, beautiful and ugly, affluent, impoverished, terrified or stoic. Here, of course, are the faces of the children, many pinched and sad, some cheerful. Caught forever in this moment in time, they all seem curiously innocent, almost tranquil. None of them know. They have no idea that they have crossed over into the land of death. They do not know that in a matter of hours, their very bodies will have vanished from the earth...

But we do. We, the modern readers and viewers, know where they are headed. We know that the parent and child, separated at "selection," will never see one another again. We know that the little old grandmother, black kerchief securely tied around her head, young children trailing her like ducklings, is leading her charges towards the gates of death. We know what is going to happen, and that gives these images a curious power - and an unbearable poignancy. ( )