Auschwitz photographer still sees images (60 years later, prisoner talks of horrors)

CNN ^ | March 4, 2006

[Hannah Senesh]

60 years later, prisoner talks of horrors he was ordered to record

ZYWIEC, Poland (AP) -- For years afterward, photographer Wilhelm Brasse saw them in his dreams -- emaciated Jewish girls, herded naked in front of his camera at Auschwitz.

Eventually, his dreams stopped. But he never took pictures again.

"I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said.

"Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas."

[colorcountry]

Saddam Hussein was almost this atrocious! It scares me to death what people can do to people....far worse than any demon, spirit or monster imaginable.

[CatoRenasci]

Hannah, it's not railing against Jews to wonder why so many Jews in the US (but not in Israel) are uncomfortable with the notion of citizens being well-enough armed to preclude something like the Holocaust. The Israeli officers I used to work with at the US Army Artillery School expressed almost universal astonishment at, and disgust with, 'typical' American Jewish hostile attitudes towards firearms and the military.

[tallhappy]

Pictures like this really show how horrible this was and how civilization can be more than barbaric even and especially in the modern scientific age.

[Shalom Israel]

Roosevelt and Truman were war-mongerors. No blood for brie. /DNC Talking Points analogy

Roosevelt doesn't come out of this smelling like a rose. He turned away Jewish refugees who later went to the gas chambers; he refused to bomb Auschwitz as part of a mission to bomb oil refineries within five miles of the death camp; he refused to urge Britain to open Palestine to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust...

Any part Roosevelt played in ending the Holocaust was purely accidental. Or, let's say, providential.

[Stirner]

"It's the nature of the antisemitic beast."

What I took the poster to be underlining is the irony that a group that has at least as much reason as any group in history to protect itself from unprovoked attack should have so many members who oppose people having access to one of the means of protecting themselves. How does noting that incongruity amount to anti-semitism?

[scory]

Exactly right. The evil lunacy that perpetrated the holocaust is still with us and still active. The wholesale butchering of human beings goes on unabated (in Darfur even as I write this). The Germans were just a little better organized than most at getting it done. And you can add to the list the mass-murdering that took place in Iraq under "Father Saddam" and his two killer sons.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.

..................

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.

..................

[colorcountry]

...and the military.

This is self explanatory based upon the article in this thread. HOWEVER - armed citizens are what protect us all from a military that is commanded by the Hitlers of the world.

[starbase]

What's so disgusting is that the universal desires of humans always remain the same. No one wants to be starving and dying, and everyone wants a plump husband, wife, and baby. And yet as universal as these things are, there was this evil regime inflicting the most horrible deaths on whole populations, while millions of others were gleefully posing for lovely family photos.

Stunning. The only way it can be possible is if you reflect that suffering things and inflicting things are two totally unrelated actions. If one is insightful, one could imagine how something horrible felt, and so refrain from inflicting it on others, but actually, without effort, hurting and being hurt remain separate, allowing genocides and even simple murders. Man's inhumanity to man.

[CatoRenasci]

It was the American military (primarily, but also the Brits and Russians) that put an end to the Holocaust. Militarys are neither inherently good or bad, but the purposes for which they are used and the principles upon which they are organized matter immensely.

[sandbar]

I still for the life of me cannot understand how human beings could do this to others. It just astounds me.

[BagelFace]

For god's sake, is it possible for there ever to be a post about the Holocaust without someone exploiting the situation to bash Jews for something or other?

Extremely silly. Silly silly silly. For example, why do 75% of Jews vote for Gore/Kerry when it hurts Isarael? Not a bashing or anti-semitic question, but a very good question. One that has been asked in such venues as National Review, for example. Are they being anti-semitic or bashing Jews? Doesn't saying that about everything like saying "it's all Bush's fault" to everything. Useless, counter-productive, and silly silly silly post.

[mtntop3]

There is a recent work published on photographs of the Lodz Ghetto by Henryk Ross who was, himself, a Pole and a prisoner there. It is very well done and immensely moving. I go through it every so often as a reconnection with reality. (Lodz Ghetto Album; published in the U. S. by the Archive of Modern Conflict; 2004.)

[veronica]

Not on a thread about the Holocaust. And Reagan got 40% of the Jewish vote.

[BagelFace]

"Not on a thread about the Holocaust."

what is so important about a thread on the holocaust that people can't comment as they normally do? you gonna police the threads that are "on the holocaust" (which this thread was really not)? on a thread about 9-11 people can't comment on how muslims are likely to vote? your sentiments are hardly noble; further, they do nothing, and mean nothing, in this context.

[kaiser80]

were murdered not by Jews but by the Nazis with the collaboration of many millions of gentiles while the rest of the world looked on with almost disinterest.

The sentence is not fully correct. There wasn't a collaboration of many millins of gentiles. There should be a much lower figure.

Second one, to be objective, gentiles weren't the only one who collaborated, there were also Jews among the collaborators.

My remarks doesn't change the fact that it was a horror, the general anti-semitism in Europe is to blame so is the lack of response of the world including American Jews.

Never again!! Never forget!!

[Fruitbat]

Never again!! Never forget!!

...as the world ushers in an ideology with equal vehemence towards Jews and Christians.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Bump.

Time for history.

[Calpernia]

photographer Wilhelm Brasse