#photographer of Mauthausen

[ela-meadows]

Mauthausen

It’s a cloudy day in Mauthausen The sky is dark and grey Silence reigns in this horrible place Where so many lost their lives

Tears fall from the dark grey skies And from eyes clouded in pain How can you escape the shadows Of those who died without a name

A window into another world That few have ever seen Is boldly placed before your face You must take a look within

The horrors of a world gone mad Where death comes every day Is something few can comprehend

The sights that you cannot forget The deadly silent air The pictures of the untold dead In the death camp’s hungry lair

Is there a way to understand The cruelty within Or is it simply a time To never let it happen again

Poem:

Podcast:

https://app.aureal.one/episode/2088922

Image Description: A collage of pictures taken at Mauthausen Concentration Camp in 2008. The upper left is the view of the sky overcast with grey clouds seen from the bottom of the steps leading away from the gas chamber. The bottom right is a picture of the sky through the stone walls and razor wire encircling the camp. On the left set above both pictures is a cut out of a burned cross displayed at the site marking Pope John Paul II’s visit.

[dirjoh-blog]

Mauthausen

Mauthausen was one of the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Located near the town of Mauthausen in Upper Austria, it was established shortly after Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. The camp, originally intended for political prisoners and those considered enemies of the Nazi regime, eventually held a wide variety of detainees, including Jews, Roma,…

[sataniccapitalist]

Francisco Boix - A Photographer in Nazi Hell named Mauthausen Concentration Camp & His Revenge

[doitinanotherlanguage]

May 2023: 1940s

(You can read more about the Reading Through the Decades reading challenge on my post introducing the challenge. Basically, it’s a year-long reading challenge where we read books - and explore other media - from the 1900s to the 2020s, decade-by-decade.)

My Recommendations for May

🎬 Lupaus (2005; Promise), dir. Ilkka Vanne 📺 World on Fire (2019-), created by Peter Bowker 🎬 Summerland (2020), dir. Jessica Swale 📖 Tuntematon sotilas (1954; Unknown Soldiers), Väinö Linna 📖 The Night Watch (2006), Sarah Waters 🎬 The Night Watch (2011), dir. Richard Laxton 🎬 말모이 (2019; Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission), dir. Eom Yu-na 🎬 A Call to Spy (2019), dir. Sarah Megan Thomas 📺 Bomb Girls (2012-2013), created by Michael MacLennan & Adrienne Mitchell 🎬 El fotógrafo de Mauthausen (2018; The Photographer of Mauthausen), dir. Mar Targarona 🎬 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), dir. Frank Capra 📺 Hollywood (2020), created by Ryan Murphy & Ian Brennan

[danielleurbansblog]

Review: The Hidden Book

Synopsis: From the bestselling author of The Jade Lily comes a compelling novel based on a true story of a WWII European heirloom that brought down war criminals and travelled through history … to be found in an Australian country shed in 2019. Europe, 1940 Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the…

[theredandwhitequeen]

Book 43 of the 50 book challenge. The Auschwitz Photographer by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis. This is a historical fiction story set in Auschwitz during wwii. The photographer is half Austrian/half Polish man from Poland, a political prisoner because he tried to leave Poland and the Nazis wanted him to fight for them. He arrived in Auschwitz in 1940 and was removed by the Germans when they escaped in January 1945 and was then sent to Mauthausen where he was liberated. The real person never took photographs after the war due to the trauma.

[randomhistoryposts]

Hunters - Trivialising the Holocaust?

I just wanted to say a few thoughts on the new Amazon show ‘Hunters’ which premiered in February 2020. I have watched the first episode, and as I am at a very busy point in my education, I have not had time to watch the rest of the season – but I intend to as I found the first episode had a very strong start. One thing I have done is read the reviews for the show, and I’ve noticed that there are an abundance of negative reviews. Common phrases I’ve seen in these reviews are that the show is ‘trivialising the Holocaust’, the show is ‘anti-white’ as well as comic book-like in nature. I didn’t want to post a long-winded review on Amazon as some do, as I thought an essay would be a bit heavy handed, but I feel the need to post my opinion somewhere, so I’m doing it here.

I am currently studying history at University, and when I was in Sixth Form I went to a three-part seminar/trip with the Holocaust Educational Trust where we discussed the ethics of media and memory of the Holocaust. For the first part of the seminar we listened to the story of one of the few Holocaust survivors still alive. For the second part, we visited Auschwitz (Which is split into three sites, Auschwitz One – with the gate ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, “Work sets you free”. Auschwitz-Birkenau – Auschwitz II, which is the second site with the train tracks and the gate tower. Finally Auschwitz III which is a chemical plant). For the third, we gathered together for one last seminar to pool together everything we had learned. During the first seminar, one question we discussed was ‘Is it ethical for Stag and Hen companies to advertise a day-trip to Auschwitz in the middle of a couple of days of drinking?’. Naturally we, as sixteen to eighteen year olds, were shocked to learn that this was in fact a real thing. Our immediate answer was no, as we did not believe Hen and Stag groups would take the experience seriously. That these companies were trivialising the Holocaust. Then we were told to think about it seriously and consider all aspects of it. Yes people would be drinking, but did that mean that they would not take the visit seriously? After thinking it over, we all then came to the opposite conclusion – no.

One of my history teachers at the time, who worked closely with the Trust and was constantly taking groups over to Auschwitz, saw many of these Stag and Hen groups the night before his trip to the sites, drinking and having a good time, as they were bound to do. The next day when he saw them at one of the three sites, he said to us that he had never seen more sober and respectful people in his life. When I went to Auschwitz myself, I wasn’t drinking the night before, but it was such a sobering experience. I visited the sites of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whilst there I saw the room of shoes, the room of human hair, any personal possessions that were salvageable, the first gas chamber and then the ones that the Nazis tried to destroy as they were losing the war. For the entire time we were there, we were all told ‘It’s ok to cry’. I felt bad because I didn’t cry – I was numb the entire time I was there, and I put that down to the information overload and the strange atmosphere that surrounds the grounds. Both my teachers cried whilst they were there. The next day at school (we were only in Poland for a day and we were in school the next. We were awake for nearly a full 24 hours by the time we got back into the UK, so we only had a few hours sleep when we arrived back home) my friend cried in our history lesson. I still didn’t. I felt horrible about it.

At this point, you may be thinking, what does any of this have to do with the new show? Well, a few months after my visit, I was watching ‘The Man in the High Castle’, which is another Amazon show based on the 1960s book of the same name by Philip K. Dick. It is set in an alternate reality where the Nazis won. There is more to it than that, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. Back then people were accusing the show of being anti-Semitic due to its content, but I disagreed with that. There was one scene in the show were a Jewish family were gassed. Just before they were gassed, a family member of theirs who was imprisoned was asked if he was familiar with Zyklon B. This was the gas that was used in the gas chambers. In Auschwitz I, there is a display with empty canisters of Zyklon B. Once this character had said that line, everything I had seen on my visit came crashing back. Then I cried. Whilst some people believed that show was trivialising the Holocaust, for me personally, it just emphasised the severity of what I had seen.

I don’t believe the new ‘Hunters’ show is trivialising the Holocaust. From what I’ve seen of the reviews, most people don’t like that the Holocaust is being ‘exploited’ for entertainment purposes. In one sense, I can see where they are coming from. One scene that people had a problem with was a “Human Chess Scene”, in which the Nazis used concentration camp prisoners as human chess pieces. When one piece had to take out another, their throat was slashed. That was the last straw for quite a few of these reviewers. I will admit that the show is highly dramatized for entertainment purposes, but I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. Whilst I can find no evidence of Nazis using a human chess board, they did do horrific things with a dramatic flair. A week or so ago, I watched a film on based on the true events that happened at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The film is called ‘The Photographer of Mauthausen’ and is available on Netflix for anyone who is interested. In this film, a man managed to escape the camp, but was unfortunately recaptured and paraded around the grounds of Mauthausen with the camp band marching in front of him playing a jaunty tune of sorts, whilst he was pulled on a cart behind them with a noose around his neck. He was later hanged, and all the prisoners had to walk past his body as a warning of what would happen to them if they tried to escape. Now we don’t know what tune the real band were playing, so some artistic license must be allowed. I didn’t include the actual picture in this essay as I don’t want to upset those who are sensitive to imagery like that, but here is the link if anyone wishes to see:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/most-austrians-dont-know-6-million-jews-were-killed-in-holocaust-survey-finds/

the image is attached to a newspaper, but I haven’t read the issue. You can search all the photographs in Google Images using ‘Mauthausen Photos’.

I was also watching something recently that said due to our culture, films and other media have to up the shock factor so-to-speak in order for the audience to fully grasp the severity of what occurred. I understand where this point has come from as I believe that most audiences today are so desensitised violence, that upping the brutality in this scene wasn’t meant to trivialise the Holocaust in any way. Instead it is to get across to today’s audiences how brutal the Nazis could be in their punishments. Yes I will admit that at times the series can be something from a comic book, but I believe that’s what makes it so entertaining. They’re not taking the Nazis seriously, and sometimes comedy can be the best way to take away something’s power. They’re not trivialising the Holocaust, they’re trying to take the scare factor that empowered the people responsible for it, away from them. I use people carefully here, as when I took part in the Holocaust Educational Trust, we were told to see the Nazis as people and not monsters for one very important reason…..

Calling someone a monster, gives the acts they commit an excuse. You expect a monster to do horrendous things. Calling the Nazis people gives them no excuse, that they must be held accountable for their actions.

Other complaints I saw regarding the show was that it was ‘anti-white’ and ‘anti-European’, these I really don’t agree with and if any of you watch the show you may understand why.

In conclusion, I don’t believe dramatizing an event that has happened fairly recently in our history for entertainment purposes, is trivialising it. People such as Philip K. Dick were creating entertainment based off the events a mere 17 years after it had happened. People will continue to do so, I feel as long as they don’t fully disrespect it, that entertainment is acceptable as it is drawing attention to the past and what occurred. For me, two of the real ways to trivialise the Holocaust would be to support the people responsible, or to outright deny the massacre of millions of people ever happened.

I realise that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. This is not meant to be me pushing my ideas onto other people, but a way of expressing my own opinion.

[overlookedwwiimedia]

The Photographer Of Mauthausen - Netflix Trailer (English)

[sacrednessintears]

Movies Watched in 2021: #2 The Photographer of Mauthausen (2018) 

[4-pork-maggot]

I was tagged by 💛💛 @blinking-sun 💛💛 to share my top 9 movies. 

(this are not in like an order or anything btw)

I am going to be tagging: @zemxem @mallr4ts @doodle-shenanigans @a-vast-african-plain @sawyer-craft @beechers-hoe and @vikinglumberjack!!! 

(no pressure to do it ofc)

[afolksongs]

In Mauthausen, everything is set to impress you. For the Chief of the Identification Service, the most important thing is the staging of the show. I quickly realized it. They needed photographers there and I turned out to be one. We have pictures of our murdered comrades. We have proof to accuse them.

[mubiss]

The Photographer of Mauthausen

[kitty-getting-pretty]

FOR FUCKSAKE TUMBLR

I just watched ‘The photographer of Mauthausen’. 

I would suggest it tbh, the director has worked with Del Toro previously. And I always seem to find Spanish made war films have a more honest sense of I dunno, the absurd yet mundane vulgarity of the horrors of war... rather then trying to tearjerk or shove the horror of it all right down your throat. 

Anyway, I tried to search ‘Mauthausen’ on Tumblr in case people were talking about the film. And what did I find. Nazi’s. Gross horrible fascist pieces of shit posting pictures of corpses from the holocaust and framing it in a positive light. 

I feel sick. 

[daremo-san]

El fotógrafo de Mauthausen, dir. Mar Targarona, 2018.

[eugeneroe]

If you haven’t yet, The Photographer of Mauthausen (El Fotógrafo de Mauthausen) just released on Netflix (in Canada at least?)

Highly reccomend, had my heart racing at times, shed a few tears. I’ve been waiting to see this moving all month!

[milimiki]

The Photographer of Mauthausen (El Fotógrafo de Mauthausen) = 3/5.

About Francesc Boix Campo, a Spaniard who worked as a photographer in the Mauthausen concentration camp, who managed to preserve 35mm film negatives as proof of the atrocities committed by the nazis.

The real life material's there, and the script seemed to offer plenty, but something about the movie felt... dull. There's a fair bit of surprising and shocking moments, but not a whole lot of tension. The movie's a retelling; it's a history lesson. But it's good enough to get people interested and research about it themselves.