Auschwitz photography exhibition leaves Holocaust survivor ‘broken hearted’

A haunting new exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, sketches and testimonies from the largest Nazi concentration camp has opened to the public.

Over one million people, mainly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz during the second world war and this exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the true dimension of the horrors committed by Nazi Germany.

“Seeing Auschwitz,” confronts the viewer with rare photographs captured by perpetrators, victims and liberators.

The images provide an unsettling perspective and stark evidence of mass murder, but also of the humanity of the people who perished there.

The 60-75 minute exhibition also offers free access to an audio guide available in English and Spanish that includes testimonies from survivors.

The vast collection of images come from varying sources including aerial allied pictures of the camps, documentation of the deportation process and living within Auschwitz as well as insight into life before the camps.

“The picture we have of Auschwitz has predominantly been given to us through the lens of the photography of the SS, the killers themselves,” Paul Salmons, lead curator of Seeing Auschwitz told LondonWorld.

“In those photographs there’s a tendency to see Auschwitz as they saw it, to share their gaze.

“What we want to do is to move beyond that, we want to try to re-humanise the people that we see in those crowds.

“Not to have them as faceless masses who arrive on the historical stage to be murdered in the way that they were seen by the SS, but rather people with families, with lives, with loves, to understand them and their experience better.

“And also to show their remarkable resilience and resistance as existing throughout that period.”

The exhibition on Old Brompton Road includes photos from an album discovered by a Holocaust survivor in the aftermath of the second world war.

The Auschwitz Album contained 193 images taken over a three-month period in 1944.

The photographers, most likely SS men, documented the arrival of people at the death camp, and the selection of those to be sent to the gas chambers.

In contrast to these photos, there are also images taken by members of the Sonderkommando (Special Squad), a group of prisoners forced by the SS to empty the gas chambers of corpses, remove their gold teeth and feed the bodies into the crematoriums.

There are also drawings, by an inmate known as MM, who depicted the brutality of the guards, and the anguish of family members that were separated and those sent to the gas chambers.

Renee Salt, 93, an Auschwitz survivor attended the opening at Old Brompton Rd on Wednesday, October 19.

She said the images left her feeling “broken-hearted” but she said exhibitions like this are important to ensure that people don’t forget what happened

Seeing Auschwitz is open to the public at 81 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD from 10am to 7pm every day till the end of December.

Tickets are available at Fever, starting at £10 for adults.