Over the course of seven years, from 2003 to 2010, I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland many times. Birkenau is the area of Auschwitz where most of the mass exterminations of Jews and others took place in World War II. It is a vast, deceptively open-feeling area that belies its oppressive, terrifying past. When the fog rolls over the abandoned camp, its true stifling nature is revealed. I first became interested in the Holocaust as an adolescent. Perhaps it was the vulnerability of youth, or the memory of my own childhood loss, but the suffering of the Holocaust victims and survivors drew me in and resonated with me deeply. I became an eager student of these historical events. I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau to experience the sensation of history—its spaces, its texture, its memories.
My most challenging work as a photographer at Auschwitz-Birkenau was trying to stay awake to the emotions, thoughts, and sensations arising within me. I didn't want to just be mechanically composing photographs, I wanted to vigilantly bear witness to the gravity of the place and moment.
Three things truly shocked me during my visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first: Walking near the open air ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, I looked down and noticed that I was walking on small bone fragments. The fresh rain had revealed hundreds of bone fragments along the edge of the ash pits where human remains were dumped. The second: Watching tourists in pretty summer dresses or casual wear photograph themselves smiling in front of the gas chamber or execution wall. Also a jolt: Juxtaposing the long row of tour buses with the iconic brick building the trains passed through on their way to the gas chambers. The third: My own insensitivity, when a small group of Hasidic Jews visiting Auschwitz asked me to take their picture. Holding their camera, I instinctively said "Smile." I couldn't judge the tourists because I saw myself in them: my thoughtlessness, my lack for respect for where I was, my distraction.
The Photos I wanted the viewer of my photos to experience the visceral sensation of the gas chamber walls, the fog of uncertainty, the claustrophobia of an unknown space. I tried to accomplish this through the use of abstract texture. The black-and-white photos of the gas chamber and crematorium interior tell me a story of fear, of suffocation. I hesitated to breathe there. To me the pictures of Birkenau in the fog evoke the oppressive mood of the place and represent our ongoing forgetting of the past.
Never Again It is easy to relegate the events of the past to semi-conscious ideas that add no gravity to my present life and actions. Every day, cycles of violence, xenophobia, oppression, and injustice continue all over the world, yet they do not stir me. I live asleep to history, and inactive to the awareness that history is continually repeating itself. What is the best thing we can do to diffuse this unconscious replaying of history we seem doomed to relive? What is needed from us to create a world where the phrase “Never Again” is finally a fact? What is it that moves us when we visit Auschwitz-Birkenau or look at pictures taken there? When we stand in front of the physical presence of the old fences and trees, and the buildings where so many suffered and died and yes, lived, where train after train brought people form all over Europe expecting “resettlement, warm food and work” only to be confronted at the last minute with the truth of their fate, we are standing at the place hope ceased to exist for more than a million people. We the living, do we have reason to be hopeful of a future without genocide, without the ‘otherization’ of the people around us?