Gary Spicer

Manchester Metropolitan University

The Sonderkommando Photographs

“Racially the Jews are monsters, flawed half breeds, a plague that needs to disappear. All that they peddle and scheme is
cursed. In terms of human breeding they are, all kidding aside, gangrenous hybrids, pests, and putrefactors. He is damned
by his own body, by the tugging of the hybrid meat that he is. From which comes the arrogance, the incredible cheek, the
head spinning conceit, the vociferous effrontery, which is so disgusting and repellant.”
Louis-Ferdinand Celine. L”ecole des cadavers (Paris: Denoel, 1938. p. 108)

In this essay I will examine four photographs taken at Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1944. They were taken at
crematorium five. It is not known for sure who took them although it has been suggested that is was a
Greek Jew named Alberto “Alex” Errera. What we know for sure is that it was an inmate at the camp.
An inmate whose job it was – with a small group of others (The Sonderkommando) - to ‘drive’ people
into the gas chambers, to clear them after ‘extermination’, to burn the bodies after death and to finally
deposit the ashes of victims into a small pond adjacent to the crematoria. I have seen this pond and
stood next to the spot depicted in the photographs. It was ‘still’, without movement, cold and strangely
lifeless. Of course it was (and is) impossible to disentangle from your memory the knowledge of what
‘happened’ there and what ‘is’ and what ‘is projected’ by this knowledge onto the space.
The Germans prior to them deserting the camp systematically destroyed the crematoria. The
foundations and the bricks and mortar still remain in piles as they fell. What these images signify and
how they should be interpreted is my concern. I will examine them principally through the lens of the
writing of Roland Barthes but I will also connect the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, particularly as derived
from his writings in ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ and Georgio Agamben and his questioning of who the true
witnesses of Auschwitz are, reflecting particularly on his book ‘Remnants of Auschwitz’.

Photography is a strange medium. It captures light. It ‘absorbs’ something of the time and place from
the moment – for that split second – when the aperture opens and closes. Whereas an artist renders,
replicates, interprets and expresses something of which they have seen or understood usually over a
‘sustained’ period of time using their eyes to inform and record, a photographer ‘points’ and ‘shoots’,
their eyes not essential in the actual ‘recording’ of the image. The camera has its own lens. What is
required is the pulse of the photographer, ‘the awareness of the moment’. ‘The Sonderkommando
Photographs’ offer us something very unique. They are not recollections, they are urgent, blurred and
snatched. As John Berger puts it, “The image seized by the camera is doubly violent and both
violence’s reinforce the same contrast: the contrast between the photographed moment and all others”
(Berger p43) Berger talks of the way photographs of agony and despair associated with war and conflict,
remind us of the ‘realities’ that lay behind the news bulletins or political ideologies. Such photographs
“are printed on the black curtain which is drawn across what we choose to forget or refuse to know
(Ibid p42). The photograph is the trace of the eye that we cannot shut. The question with ‘the
Sonderkommando Photographs’ is what are they trying to make us see?
Firstly, the way the images are presented and cropped reveals a huge amount about their truth. In Fig 2
we can clearly see the silhouette of the door framing the image. To reframe the image as in Fig 1
(which is often the way in which the image is reproduced) is to suggest the image was taken outside in
the open air. This would imply that the photographer was ‘free’ to do so. (This of course was a
convenient anomaly for the holocaust deniers to point out). When the black frame is included we can
see that the photographer was ‘shooting from the hip’ was undetected and not at all considering the
aesthetic of the image. The images (Fig 1 and 2) are taken from within the gas chamber, the thick black
frame providing a skewed border, a second ‘interior’ viewfinder that focuses us upon and inheres the
violence taking place in the sun outside. A stark and chilling juxtaposition. “This black expanse which
surrounds the spectacle of the corpses and the pits, this expanse where nothing is visible gives, in reality a
visual marker as precious as the all the rest of the exposure. The expanse where nothing can be seen is
the space of the gas chamber, the dark chamber where it is necessary to retreat to bring to light the work
of the Sonderkommado outside. This black expanse gives us the situation itself, it is the space of possibility
that allows the photographs to exist” (Didi-Huberman p52)

The photograph reveals three truths. The horror of the conditions, the fear of the photographer and his
bravery. Susan Sontag in ‘On Photography’ quotes Zola the ‘literary realist’ who said “you can not
claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it”. The Sonderkommando
Photographs attest to a reality that without their existence we would be reliant on inconsistent and
‘unreliable memories’. Barthes also believed that the photograph, rather than ‘bringing up the past’,
contests that what we can see in them ‘actually existed’ and because ‘Alex’ (if that indeed was his name)
saw what he did and crudely recorded it, by proxy so have we.

Roland Barthes interest in photography was specifically from the view of the spectator, the reader. He
described the initial ‘rush’ of looking at an image as the ‘studium’. This is the main point or message in
a photograph. He described the ‘punctum’ as the stage of further enquiry, the reading of detail ‘that
pierces and punctuates’ meaning as the ‘punctum’. It is the ‘punctum’ that grabs our attention; and
according to Barthes is involuntary. He said “The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is
not)...” (Barthes p51. CL). The involuntary aspect of viewing these images (the studium) is dramatic.
The framing of the window inevitably draws us to the burning bodies outside. Black and white, out of
focus. We know that this is something we were not intended to see. Like we ourselves are peering
through a crack in a door or through a keyhole, not believing what we are witnessing. More
importantly not believing that anyone else would believe what we were witnessing. This is precisely why
the images are so important. What they do also is challenge or render discussion of ‘photographic
representation’ as problematic. We are familiar with the literature, film, and poetic ‘representation’ of
the Holocaust; less equipped I would suggest to deal with such primary evidence delivered to us
through the eye/lens of victims. Ernst Jünger the German novelist and diarist said in 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”? (Jünger
P31). This is undoubtedly true, our relationship to events of horror and atrocity are yielded through the
proxy eye of the lens but nonetheless they often come under scrutiny. Barthes calls the photograph “a
certificate of presence” (Barthes p87. CL) and points out how we are able to differentiate between a
drawn or painted image, an icon, (Picasso’s Guernica for example) and a photograph. The photograph
creates ‘an index’ by virtue of representing its object through ‘contact’ and presence. “The item had to
be there for an indexical representation of it to exist” (Olin, p100). In our visual culture we are much
more persuaded by indexical representation than iconic. A photograph is both index and icon. Because
more than merely a fingerprint (a literal stamp of presence), the photograph holds content and
contextual ‘signs’ of representation. It becomes problematic however when ‘slippage’ occurs between
one form of ‘identification’ and another. This is what I mean when I asked what it is that the
Sonderkommando Photographs ‘are trying to make us see’?

According to Barthes it would be the ‘Punctum’ of the images i.e. the reading of the detail “that
accident which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to me.” (Barthes CL 26-27) that would
facilitate our ‘further’ understanding of the images, denoting our cultural, linguistic, and political
interpretations of the images. In the case of the ‘Sonderkommando Photographs’ they themselves
clearly do not allow for easily objective reflection or analysis. Furthermore, according to Dan Stone,
they do not comfortably comply with Barthes analytical ideas as, “the dichotomy of studium and
punctum cannot be maintained” (Stone p138) Stone points out that in fact the studium is the punctum.
That the very thing that “pricks and bruises” us (Ibid) is the thing that interests us. Though in images
282 and 283 (Fig 3 and 4) this does not occur instantly or without the ‘narrative’ and guidance of
images 280 and 281 (Fig 1 and 2) that precede them. There is no stage of quiet reflection, of
contemplative examination. The images stun us with their voracity. There is no escape.  
 
In image 283 (Fig 4) we are led to the idea of ‘nothingness’ of the punctum being something we are led
to. Barthes would equate this to contrasting the erotic and the pornographic. In pornography we are
given and ‘exposed’ to everything, all detail, all ambiguities, all suggestion is given over to the explicit
nature of the uncompromising yet ‘unchallenging’ image. In eroticism we are guided, given a prelude,
given clues that we can interpret, a wonder we can anticipate. In image 282 (Fig 3) but more ‘explicitly’
in image 283 (Fig 4) we are unfortunately guided, by the urgency of the image-maker (possibly Alex).
We can feel his breath, his anxiety, the speed he is running, the uneven landscape, with the camera at
his hip or hidden under his jacket. The stridency of the sun – unaware of what is occurring under its
glare – bristles through the trees. It is a photograph of ‘nothing’ yet a photograph of ‘everything’. It is
all there. “The picture that attests to Auschwitz must do so as much by what it fails to show as by what
it does. In this final photograph (image 283/Fig 4) the spectator is directed towards the punctum by the
grey zone of shapeless non representation that occupies the image” (Chare p149). The final
Sonderkommado image (Fig 4) is defined by this grey, boundless colour which artist Gerhard Richter
describes as “the impossible colour, horrible” (Ibid) it “gestures towards such a dissolution of
boundaries” (Ibid), formless, with no real shape. It signals a world where there was no meaning, no
colour, no balance or symmetry. Just grey and “horrible”. Richter elaborates, “grey has the capacity
like no other colour has, to make nothing visible” (Ibid).  
  
 
Primo Levi in his book ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ dedicates a chapter to the concept of the ‘Gray
Zone’. Here he expands upon subjugation and dominance and of the nature of total domination. He
confronts difficult issues around complicity ad responsibility. It is an essay principally about power1.  
To Levi the ‘Gray Zone’ was the area of ‘ambiguity’ to which the Sonderkommando themselves
belonged, of a community based on terror and obsequiousness, where permission to live was granted
on the basis of compliance in the ‘execution’ of duties that perpetuated the system of horror in the
camps. It is here where the soul was extirpated.

The notion of photography, as imagined by its inventor William Henry Fox -Talbot in 1833 was not as
a device to ‘authorstrate’ or to interpret but to ‘scribe’ and record. The photographer was “thought to
be an acute but non interfering observer” (Sontag. OP. p88.). However, it quickly became clear, as the
mediums popularity grew, that no two people took the same photograph of a subject and that more
than the lens being an objective, impersonal eye and the photograph being merely evidence of what is
there, photographs were also evidence of what an individual has seen. It would be seen that
photographers “would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active,
acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision” (Sontag. OP. p90.) The Sonderkommando
photographs, like a crane fly caught in amber, entrapped a moment in history, in the summer of 1944.

In considering my visit to Auschwitz and seeing for myself the site of mass extermination and then
confronting the stories of individual suffering as I was ‘guided’ around the site, I became aware of how
as a visitor (a tourist) I saw the site as both real and imaginary. I recorded in my notebook at the time
that the experience was akin to my visit in 1980 to the back lot of Universal Studios in California.
There I saw the house that was used in the Hitchcock film ‘Psycho’ and the facades and frontages of
‘New York’ streets. Fictions that through the medium of film and memory blur with reality to become
‘abstracts’ and ‘simulations’. Jean Baudrillard in ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ explores these ideas more
fully. Attributed to Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, Baudrillard restated, “The simulacrum is never
that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is
true”. More accurately a paraphrase from Ecclesiastes in which he condemns the pursuit of wisdom as
folly and a 'chasing after wind' (Ecclesiastes 1.17) “I have seen all the works that are done under the
sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1.14). Baudrillard sites Disneyland
as the “perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation” (Baudrillard p167)
Clearly Baudrillard is talking here about ‘Hyperreality’, a real more real than real. Disneyland as a
microcosm of America, of all that is American, “a miniturised pleasure of real America” (Baudrillard
p12). It is in the ‘Disneyfication’ of real history however (as in the case of Auschwitz) where the
anomaly occurs. Although Auschwitz was no fantasy, like a theme park, we are taken on coaches. And
arrive in huge car parks. We queue to pay and enter. There are shops. Hundreds of people every day

                                                                                                               
1  The sort of biopower that Foucault described as a means of regulating people through "an explosion of numerous and diverse
techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations" (Foucault p119)  
arrive to see for themselves, to touch history. Then we are guided around the location, through
buildings and across landscape, landscape etched in memory, iconic landscape. Reminded of Barthes
notion of photography being a certificate of presence, photographs that are now more real and contain
more history than the place itself.

The idea of Auschwitz as a bleak movie back lot gives rise to the idea of the memorializing of ‘location’,
where entertainment and ‘truth’ (Simulacra and Simulation) become blurred and vibrate to create new
meanings and inevitably new histories which accord to postmodern notions of plurality and individual
rather than singular histories. (Spaghetti junction rather than a singular track). We are forced to ask
whether it is the photograph or the place that is the simulacrum, the copy, that in the absence of the
original, i.e. ‘Being there’, which offers us the most truth. Baudrillard go’s on to talk of ‘truth’ in the
context of memory and of forgetting; he juxtaposes the extermination of memories with the holocaust.
“ Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of
history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us,
inaccessible to us in its truth”. (www 2). We are offered by film, television and photography – in the
guise of an artificial memory - a sort of fabricated truth and ‘the illusion of authenticity’.

When smuggling out the film containing the Sonderkommado photographs, the following words were
attached. “We are sending you pictures from Birkenau, from a gassing operation. The picture shows
one of the pyres in the open air, on which corpses are burned, when the crematorium cannot keep up
with the burning. In front of the pyre lie corpses, waiting to be thrown on the pyre. The other picture
shows one of the places in the little woods, where people undress supposedly for a shower, and then go
to the gas”. (www 3)
The photographs are unique because along with the physicality of the photographic ‘evidence’ itself
(and I use the word evidence deliberately) we have the words of the group responsible for their
existence. Barthes said that the photograph puts an end to us resisting history and to believing in the
past when he said, with the photograph, “the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is
as certain as what we touch” (Barthes p88). It is what they mean that go’s to the heart of the discussion.
Again, Jean Baudrillard perhaps offers us partial illumination by suggesting, “Reproduction is
diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate”. (Baudrillard p170) Meaning
that photography as a simulation, an effigy, is always open to manipulation and interpretation (again
we are back to the multiplicity of meaning, the postmodern spaghetti junction model!) In some ways
this is a good thing as the images are not metonymically representative of the holocaust in themselves
and should not be seen as such. Auschwitz itself already serves as that. If this were the case, the
‘signifier’ (the photograph) would assume or be assigned a meaning that the ‘signified’ (the event being
photographed) did not have. Conversely, “it is exactly the indexical correspondence between the
signifier and the signified that gives these photographs their tremendous significance”. (Stone p133).
Furthermore, in this case what the photographs ‘denote’ and what they ‘connote’ are equivalent. In
other words what is shown in the images is exactly what gives them their meaning. “The analogon - what
is depicted - is indivisible from the way in which the social meaning is generated” (Ibid). A photograph
"transmit[s]...the scene itself, the literal reality" (Barthes p17 imt); this offers us a "perfect analogon"
(Ibid) of the subject.

A further challenge to our search for what the Sonderkommado Photographs are telling us (or trying to
tell us) comes from Giorgio Agamben in ‘Remnants of Auschwitz’. Here Agamben attempts
(controversially) to question (or account for) the language of the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors. He
uses a collection of ‘binaries’ or counterpoints to explain and examine the relationship between
testimony and witnessing. Binaries such as subjectification/de-subjectification, human/inhuman, the
possible/impossible and so on. These binaries explore the gap between the said and the unsaid and is
for Agamben where the ‘archive’ of testimony and ‘witnessing’ lie. I.e.” testimony exists in the potentiality
of the unsaid” (www 5). Agamben seems to challenge and probe the voracity of witness testimony and
the ethical and philosophical questions raised by it. He questions whether something so horrific, so
numbing and so explicit can legitimately ever be borne witness to. He uses the word ‘lacuna’ which
means a gap or missing part and likens their testimony to this. The ‘lacuna’ is the gap that Agamben
endeavours to interrogate. He says in ‘Remnants of Auschwitz’. “Testimony is the disjunction between
two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to
a non-language to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language
that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point
of taking on a different insignificance – that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition
cannot bear witness”. (Agamben p76). The testimony of these witnesses is bound by the notion of loss
and the concept of ‘no longer’ No longer did they feel human, no longer did they believe in heaven and
hell, no longer did they want anything from anyone, no longer could they speak. The void of which
Agamben speaks is the state of being ‘no longer’ man and ‘no longer’ living, who “can no longer speak,
language being no longer a text or reality” (www 5). The ‘remnants’ then, according Agamben are not
the victims who were murdered in the gas chambers or those that survived “neither the drowned nor
the saved”, (Levi p26) but is somewhere between the two. This is the void, the gap, and the lacuna to
which we should attempt to listen.

Returning to the ‘Sonderkommado Photographs’ we can now begin to appreciate the value and
significance of their existence. They do not rely on language, they transcend the Agamben discourse on
language and it’s ineptitude to ‘voice’ Holocaust’ testimony. These are the unique account of witnesses,
a representation of what they saw, unfettered by the fragilities of memory. Stark. They undermine the
notion of the aforementioned binary, the potency and significance of the ‘gap’ between, the space and
of speaking “only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking” (Chare p10). They offer us “an
alternative means of bearing witness to the impossibility of speaking”. The photographs subvert the Barthes
idea of signification also in that their horror is never signified, it is evident, and it shows itself to the
viewer unambiguously.

In the work of Dirk Reinartz (Fig 5) we have photographic images that seem to attempt to access the
lacuna and to visualize that space as defined by Agamben, that space between the murdered and the
survived. The images omit any ‘evidence’ of historicism, no bodies or remnants of buildings. Rather,
they are landscapes, spaces; clearings edged with pine trees, scuffed earth, silent, remnants of time
perhaps? It is a single image taken from one perspective. It is ordinary in this way, it is unambiguous,
one viewpoint, strictly organized “it turns our attention not to the sites natural beauty or to the marks
of the culture on the land but to our position in reference to the site” (Baer p73). The Reinartz image taken in
1985 is called ‘Deathly Still’. Taken more than 60 years after the war and the liberation of the death
camps it “employs a classic aesthetic means of drawing attention to the difficulties of linking, on the one
hand, philosophical efforts to understand and historicist attempts to explain with, on the other had, the
actual events of the exterminations” (Baer p67). These images make no attempt to confront the events
and the horror that took place. They do not show us “the abyss opened by the Nazi’s crimes” (Ibid) or
offer us any explanation for it. What they appear to do is to place us, the viewer, the reader in relation
to it. To confront it and to force us to ask what our position should be?

These images contrast with the Sonderkommado photographs in obvious ways. The Reinartz image is
a vacuum, a relentless empty void. Its potency is in its ‘lack’. It is what is not there that is shocking. It is
its banality, its ordinariness. The Sonderkommado photographs perform a more clinical and salutary
function. They ‘prove’ that what Reinartz’s image purports to ‘memorise’ actually happened. They
show, perhaps uniquely, the death camp functioning. Newsreels of the liberation of the death camps in
1945 show bodies being bulldozed into pits and piled high. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt
pointed out the camp did not look like this when it was ‘working’ the Nazis “exterminated their inmates
systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness, then immediately cremated them” (Sontag p75) What
the Sonderkommado images do (different from what they are trying to tell us) is “lay down routes of
reference” (Ibid) they help us to build our sense of these events that happened in the past, and because
all memory is individuated and dies with the individual, they offer a narrative of what actually took
place and “lock the story in our mind” (Ibid). Photographs make us ‘remember’ these events; they
remind us of things that have happened in our mechanized, ‘archivable’ past. We cannot ‘remember’
the ‘Black Death’; the devastating pandemic in the 14th Century killed 1.5 million people out of a total
population of 4 million. (That would be the equivalent today of 21 million people). Although there are
engravings and paintings that offer a facsimile of what it looked like (mostly made much later), there
clearly are no photographs of this devastating event. As a result it is removed from our collective
consciousness and confused with myth. As a result we have no clear understanding of this tragedy. It is
true that “Remembering through photographs eclipses all other forms of understanding”. (Sontag p75)

Images like the Reinartz ‘landscape’ and the Sonderkommado Photographs taken 60 years apart
perhaps signify in that hiatus, a legitimate testimony and through its excavation, we are able to ascribe
‘meaning’ to what those 4 photographs taken furtively in the summer of 1944, in the death camp in
Oswiecim/Auschwitz are actually trying to tell us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and Journals

Agamben, G. (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. MIT Press; New Ed edition
Baer, U. (2002). Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. MIT Press. Mass.
Barthes, R. (1982) Camera Lucida. Jonathan Cape. London.
Barthes, R (1977) Image, Music, Text. "The Photographic Message." Ed. Stephen Heath. New York.
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.
Berger, J. (1980) ‘Photographs of Agony,’ in About Looking, Bloomsbury. London.
Bravo, A (2002) On the Gray Zone. Primo Levi Centro Internazionale di Studi.  
Chare, N. (2011) Auschwitz and Afterimages, Abjection, Witnessing and Representation. I.B Tauris. London.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2003) Images malgre tout. Les Editions de Minuit. Paris.
Foucault, M (1976) The History of Sexuality Vol 1
Jünger, E (1993) “On Danger,” New German Critique. Issue No 59.
Levi, P (1989) The Drowned and the Saved. Vintage. London.
Olin, M (2002) Touching Photographs: Barthes's "Mistaken" Identification.  University of California Press.
Sontag, S. Ed (1982) A Roland Barthes Reader. Vintage Classics.
Sontag, S. (1971) On Photography. Penguin Modern Classics. London.
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. Hamish Hamilton. London
Stone, D. ‘The Sonderkommando Photographs’. Jewish Social Studies.

Websites
www 1
Victoria Nesfield. The Holocaust Experience: The Role of the Place in Holocaust Education
http://yorksj.academia.edu/VictoriaNesfield/Papers
(Accessed 03 04 12)

www 2
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - III. Holocaust. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-iii-holocaust/
(Accessed 29 04 12)

www 3
Fotografie > Acts of Resistance
http://www.sonderkommando-studien.de/artikel.php?c=fotografie/resistance
(Accessed 29 04 12)

www 4
An Ethics of Bare Life: Agamben on Witnessing >  Catherine Mills. Australian National University.
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/mills_agamben.html
(Accessed 01 05 12)

www 5
Hooked Into Machine: Writing on Writing Online
http://hookedintomachine.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/giorgio-agamben%E2%80%99s-remnants-
of-auschwitz-the-witness-and-the%C2%A0archive/
Images
Fig 1. Sonderkommando Photograph #280. August 1944
Fig 2. Sonderkommando Photograph #281. August 1944
Fig 3. Sonderkommando Photograph #282. August 1944
Fig 4. Sonderkommando Photograph #283. August 1944*
Fig 5. Dirk Reinartz. Sobibor from Deathly Still: Pictures of Former Concentration Camps. 1995.

*All Sonderkommando photographs property of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim, Poland.

Additional reading
Batchen, G. (2009) Photography degree Zero. Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. MIT Press. Mass
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