(bez virsraksta)

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Okt. 29., 2020 | 10:49 am

For days after viewing the photographs, I could not shake the girl’s expression from my mind.

She is around 16 years of age and looking directly into the camera.

The girl has only recently arrived at the camp. On her lower lip there is a cut. Her eyes stare directly into the lens and the fear transmits itself across the decades.

But until Wilhelm Brasse told me his extraordinary story I had no idea how the photograph came to be taken. His voice trembles as he recounts what happened.

‘She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn’t understand why she was there and she couldn’t understand what was being said to her.

So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing.’

Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. ‘To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn’t interfere. It would have been fatal for me. You could never say anything.’

Brasse is the holder of a grim distinction. A political prisoner of the Nazis himself, he was for a long period the main camp photographer at Auschwitz, the man into whose lens countless doomed prisoners stared before their deaths.

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