Three Tearless Histories by Erich Hackl & Mike Mitchell

Author:Erich Hackl & Mike Mitchell [Hackl, Erich & Mitchell, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Published: 2016-12-15T21:00:00+00:00

THE ONLY CHEERFUL PHOTO from Auschwitz, with a promise of happiness, has stayed with me for fifteen years. Wilhelm Brasse took it in the Records Department on the morning of March 18, 1944, after the civil wedding of the Austrian, Rudi Friemel, who was under preventive detention, and the Spaniard Margarita Ferrer, who on this occasion was allowed to stay in the camp for one day and one night, accompanied by their child, who was three years old. I found prints of this photo in Vienna, Madrid and Paris. The description of these events in a posthumously published sketch by Margarita suggested the photographer was a prisoner from Vienna who had long since died. That is what it says in my story about The Wedding in Auschwitz, which was published just four years ago. I have only heard about Brasse now, with the appearance of the Polish edition, but in reality our acquaintance is a result of the invisible threads running through places and times:

On May 19, 1944, the Ovici family arrived in Auschwitz in a train-load of Hungarian Jews. They were ten brothers and sisters who came from Transylvania and had appeared in concert halls and vaudeville theaters in Budapest. Seven of them, all of restricted growth, performed songs and sketches under the name of Trupa liliput, while the rest, two women and one man, played klezmer music. These three were no different than other people, apart from the fact that they had short arms and legs like their brothers and sisters. But precisely that was what aroused Mengele’s interest. He subjected them to a series of experiments, the effects of which Brasse had to record with the camera.

Fifty years later a woman from the disabled movement, Hannelore Witkofski, was interested in the fate of persons of restricted growth in German concentration camps. She went to Israel to visit Perla Ovici, the last survivor of the klezmer trio, and it was from her that she learnt the name of the photographer who had documented Mengele’s experiments. She found Brasse’s address through the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, went to Żywiec and questioned him on camera about the victims of Nazi medical research. The Polish documentary journalist, Irek Dobrowolski, happened to see the interview, about six years ago, Brasse says, and decided to make a film about him, Brasse, the portrait of a portraitist, so to speak; and Portrecista is the title of the film that Dobrowolski made, with his own equipment and at his own expense because no one was prepared to finance it, but since it was shown this year on Polish television and at film festivals abroad, Brasse’s telephone in ul. Sienkiewicza keeps on ringing and people he’s never heard of ask him whether he might have photographed their parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts, cousins, etc. in Auschwitz, perhaps he can remember. He is happy to receive such calls, he helps wherever he can, though he advises them to call in the morning, for after lunch his wife switches the television on and it’s quite possible he wouldn’t hear the telephone ring.

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