A photographer’s search for his mother in Nazi concentration camps
Hindustan TimesPiles of skeletal bodies, the doors to a crematorium, emaciated faces - an AFP photographer documents the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps in the spring of 1945, as he searches for his deported mother. One-time fashion photographer and having escaped as a prisoner from a train bound for Germany, later joining the Resistance, Eric Schwab was one of the first photographers to work for AFP after it was refounded in August 1944 in a liberated Paris. One of Schwab’s first published photographs is of the entrance gate to Buchenwald, bearing the terrible inscription “Jedem das Seine”. Another shot shows a man in striped prison garb talking through barbed wire to a woman held in the camp’s brothel. Photographic evidence of the concentration camp horrors was widely disseminated as early as 1945, but Schwab’s work did not earn him the renown of some of the other photographers.
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