CAMPS DE MORT – “The Death Camps” – an early booklet of photographs from the death camps, edited by Irene Gaucher. Paris, 1946. On its pages are dozens of hard-to-see photographs from the Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Landsberg, and other camps, alongside photographs of the survivors – horrifying first-hand evidence of the unimaginable. Introduction by VERCORS. French. rare.
The many photographs that appear here, some of them were taken by the Nazis during the war and were found by the Allies when the camps were liberated, the Nazis photographed the Jewish prisoners in forced labor, in the mass morning order (in the Mauthausen camp) and more, alongside photographs that were taken by the Allies in the various camps on the days of liberation and in the weeks that followed – This part is very difficult to watch because it was filmed bodies, parts of bodies, prisoners who died of starvation with signs of torture on their bodies, the torture facilities in the camps, and more. All with the aim of documenting the horrors of the Nazis firsthand and revealing as quickly as possible to the wider world the horrors that took place in them. The booklet is divided into chapters where each chapter is unique to one camp, describes what happened there and is accompanied by difficult described photographs. In the editor’s preface it is written that from the beginning he did not think of publishing such harsh photographs such as those that were brought in the brochure because he himself did not believe the harsh reports about the systematic extermination of Polish Jewry by the Nazis and the horrors that took place in the death camps, and even upon discovering that more and more people claim that the stories about the horrors that took place in the camps are imaginary: “I didn’t believe the stories, such brutal crimes… how could I believe?”. Until he saw the harsh scenes in the photographs that were distributed one after the other: “In these nameless photographs the terrible truth is revealed…”. He decided to bring the photographs as they are, with all the difficulty involved, in order to reveal to the world the unimaginable truth about what the Nazis did to the Jews in the death camps.
56 p. 28 cm. Very good condition.
