On the death of Jews by Nadine Fresco

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Nadine Fresco is telling the story of a collection of photographs and most importantly the story of the picture seen in those photographs.

These eight photographs show a group of Jews in the moments before and after their murders, on the shore near the city of Liepaja, part of the Holocaust.

This therefore is a story of the mass murder of the Holocaust, but also of the individual murders of the Holocaust. We need to tell both those stories.

That there are photographs of such a shocking event is a window into minds of those carrying out the killings – we now live in an age of constant image making, the 1940s were not like that. Yet the fact that the Nazis repeatedly issued order prohibiting the photographing of these acts of extermination points to a reality that those involved somehow couldn’t resist recording the events. In at least one of this group of photographs the women are posed, moments before they are killing, moments in which they clearly knew their fate, they are made to stand in line, in underwear, a moment of utter humiliation and yet there they stand with a certain dignity.

The photographs, after the war, were used by various people in their retelling of the Holocaust, but often they were attributed to the wrong location – they became an archetype rather than a record of a specific event. And Nadine Fresco explores how this dynamic of dislocation is troubling. It acts as another layer of the stripping of the humanity and individuality of those capture in the photos, those shot on that beach.

A key part of the book is therefore the reclaiming of the specificity of the event show – even if it is not possible to put names to the faces shown it is possible to give an account to that group of Jews, killed over 3 days in December 1941.

In naming the victims of the Holocaust there is a reclaiming of their humanity. And this is such an important thing, especially as we get further and further away and the last of the direct witnesses are no longer with us – we need to hold the reality, the particularity, of this crime sharp in our minds – keep the fact that the systematic killing of millions of people could be so easily normalised as the warning against all those that peddle the idea that “truth” is subjective...