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The Sonderkommando
Photographs
Dan Stone
R
ecent debates concerning the possibility of representing the
Holocaust focus on postwar attempts to do so, often by people
who did not experience the events directly.
1
The much-discussed
works of survivors were of course produced after the liberation of the
camps. Much of the existing literature on the representation of the
Holocaust, dealing with retrospective reconstructions or responses, tends
to concentrate on literature, poetry, film, or historiography. The special
problems of photography—especially photography from the period—
as a medium of representation have until recently been overlooked.
The Sonderkommando photographs, however, are so important
precisely because they are not recollections. There is an urgency, an
immediacy about these photographs that appears to render the whole
discussion of representation problematic. In the face of full-frontal
atrocity, the impulse to theorize seems almost offensive. Can one say
more about these photographs than confirm Ernst Jünger’s claim from
1931 that “Already today there is hardly an event of human significance
toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is
not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision
through which humanity’s new relation to danger becomes visible in
an exceptional fashion”?
2
In the following pages, I argue that the Sonderkommando photo-
graphs, far from revealing the inadequacy of theoretical thought,
actually demand an awareness of it, because these photographs go far
beyond what Jünger had in mind in 1931. The photographs themselves
are of such manifest importance that I must state at the outset that this
article is only an attempt to broaden an awareness of the existence of
these photographs with the aid of a theoretical vocabulary. If the
 language of representation is of use, then a discussion in its terms
should be a promising way to approach these photographs.
3
One thing that makes these photographs so significant is that, unlike
the well-known SS photographs in the so-called Lili-Jacob Album (or
Auschwitz Album) or the photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto clear-
ance,
4
these photographs were taken by inmates of Birkenau. Specific-
ally, they were taken by one or two members of the Sonderkommando,
the special squads composed mainly of Jewish inmates but also of
Russian prisoners of war who were forced to work in and around the
gas-chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, in the summer of 1944.
5
Furthermore, despite some knowledge of the circumstances in
which the photographs were taken, we do not know for sure who took
them. In her contribution to the official publication of the Auschwitz
museum, Barbara Jarosz says that the photographs were taken “by
members of the Sonderkommando of crematorium V: Alex from
Greece (his full name is unknown), Shlomo Dragon and his brother
Josel, Alter Szmul Fajnzylberg (known in the camp as Stanisîaw
Jankowski), and David Szmulewski.”
6
On the information board placed
by the museum on the grounds of crematorium V in 1995, the photo-
graphs are ascribed to the Greek Jew, Alex. One should note also the
testimony of Fajnzylberg, who says: “I want to emphasize once again
that when these pictures were taken, all the prisoners I mentioned were
present. In other words, even though the Greek Jew, Alex, was the
person who pressed the shutter, one can say that the pictures were
taken by all of us.”
7
Unfortunately, in Gideon Greif’s book of interviews
with surviving Sonderkommando members, we learn nothing new
about the photographs, even in the inter view with the Dragon broth-
ers. All we can be sure of is that—along with the hidden Sonder-
kommando writings
8
—these photographs are among the most
astonishing of the various artifacts to have emerged from Auschwitz. In
terms of the visual record, they are unquestionably the most important
documents that we have. Photographs taken by members of the SS are
today no less horrific to our eyes for the fact of their authorship, but
the Sonderkommando photographs are especially harrowing, not only
because of their content but also because of the extreme difficulties
involved in taking them, smuggling the film out of the camp, and
having them developed in Kraków.
What I want to discuss here is precisely the status of these photo-
graphs as historical documents, their use as evidence, and the way in
which the theory of representation can help the observer approach
them. I want specifically to address the contradiction between one’s
immediate response to the photographs—granting them their status as
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Social
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irrefutable evidence—and the unease that is felt before them when
they are considered as representations. The photographs offer a cer-
tain closeness to events as well as emphasize distance. This discourse of
representation asserts that the medium of photography, contrary to
one’s instinctive (because socially constructed) response, is not trans-
parent: the “signifier” does not refer in an uncomplicated way to the
“signified.” To claim otherwise is to succumb to an “edenic notion of
the visual” in which the transformation necessary in producing “ana-
logical and indexical signs” is obfuscated.
9
Indeed, one critic claims
that seeing the photograph “as the representation of nature itself, as
an unmediated copy of the real world” and therefore as “true,” consti-
tutes a “bourgeois folklore” that has been complicit in the history of
photography as a tool in reinforcing uneven relations of power.
10
The feeling of unease before technological reproduction is
longstanding, as old as the history of the mirror. As Jean Baudrillard
suggests, “Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes
something fundamental vacillate. . . . [S]imulation . . . is still and
always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control
and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image
of photo) always had as objective an operation of black magic.”
11
On
the one hand, this seems to be a promising approach; after all, we do
not want to fall into the trap of seeing in the photographs privileged
moments of time rescued from oblivion, making them stand metonym-
ically for the genocide as a whole, as “Auschwitz” already does. This
would give to the signifier a meaning that the signified (the very
moment that is arrested) did not have.
12
But, on the other hand, it is
exactly the indexical correspondence between the signifier and the
signified that gives these photographs their tremendous significance.
In Roland Barthes’s terms, the denotative function is equivalent with
the connotative function—that is, it is precisely
what
the photographs
depict that gives them their meaning for us.
13
The
analogon
—what is
depicted—is indivisible from the way in which the social meaning is
generated. Or so we would like to think.
In fact, as already suggested, this is the sort of claim dismissed by
some theorists of photography. The
analogon
is nothing without the
social and cultural conventions that permit interpretations of it.
According to John Tagg, the “indexical nature of the photograph—the
causative link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign—is
therefore highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at
the level of meaning.”
14
This seems logical enough, especially in light
of the introduction to this article: only with some historical informa-
tion surrounding the production of the photographs, combined with
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The
Sonderkommando
Photographs
•
Dan Stone
#280, Auschwitz Museum. (All
photographs reproduced by
permission of the State Museum
of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Oåwiêcim, Poland.)
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Jewish
Social
Studies
#281, Auschwitz Museum.
an awareness of our cultural response to mass-murder, in particular to
the privileged place that Auschwitz has in our tableau of Western
nadirs, can we formulate a serious response to the Sonderkommando
photographs. Even to call them “the Sonderkommando photographs”
as I do here gives them a meaning that is not contained in the images
themselves. Were we to come to them cold, so Tagg’s argument goes,
we could not know what they mean. Or, rather, our attempts at finding
meaning would be vague and unfocused, being some sort of general-
ized response to horrific (280/281) or disorienting (282/283) images.
Photographs without context carry no moral message.
15
But perhaps Tagg’s claims are overstated. Suppose we did come to
the photographs cold. What could be said about them? First, their
startling nature emphasizes a paradox common to all photographs: the
contradiction between the static signifier (the unchanging photo-
graph one can hold in one’s hand) and the active signified. Here this
paradox is emphasized because the signified, the moment in the
infinite sequence of time that has been arrested and ossified, is so
clearly characterized by activity.
16
And not just ordinary activity: there
is an attack on the senses of which we are aware but which we cannot
experience, an atmosphere of violence, to put it mildly. Naked bodies
lie on the ground, and behind them is the smoke from (presumably)
other burning bodies. Even without knowing that these are innocent
Jewish victims of genocide or that the “workers” in the photograph are
destined for the same fate, the contrast between the comfortable
medium of the photographs and their subject matter is unusually
disquieting.
In addition to the paradoxical clash of signifier and signified, the
Sonderkommando photographs highlight another attribute of photog-
raphy. According to Tagg, the unconscious signified of all photographs
is the presence of death.
17
This attribute is especially clear in contrast
to film. Christian Metz writes that film, colluding with the wishful
thinking of the viewer, gives back to the dead a “fragile semblance” of
life; “Photography, on the contrary, by virtue of the objective sugges-
tions of its signifier (stillness, again) maintains the memory of the dead
as
being dead
.”
18
In photographs 280 and 281, death is not merely the
unconscious signified; it is the explicit signified. But the distance of the
photographer from the corpses suggests that these are no sensational,
authorized news photographs such as became common during the
Vietnam or the Gulf Wars. It is the very fact of the dead
being dead
, of a
more urgent witnessing to murder, that is the point of the photograph.
This lack of aestheticization—their “messiness” or “failings” as pho-
tographs—means that it is hard to concur with Susan Sontag when she
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The
Sonderkommando
Photographs
•
Dan Stone
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