Eric Schwab, photographs of the inhuman

 By Yves gacon

PARIS, 12 February 2014 - These are just a few dozen photos by Eric Schwab in the Agence France-Presse archives. An insignificant number in a photographic collection of more than thirty million digital documents and seven million film archives. But it is invaluable in terms of both memory and history.

Eric Schwab, one of the first photographers to work for AFP after the agency was refounded in August 1944, witnessed the horrors that the Allies discovered as they liberated the death camps in Germany.

Together with the American writer and journalist Meyer Levin, they embarked on a painful 'quest' in 1945: Levin investigating the fate of the Jewish people in Europe during the Second World War, Schwab searching for his mother who had been deported in 1943.

« Nous savions. Le monde en avait entendu parler. Mais jusqu’à présent aucun d’entre nous n’avait vu. C’était comme si nous avions pu enfin pénétrer à l’intérieur même du cœur noir, dans les replis du cœur maléfique » écrit Meyer Levin dans son récit In Search, paru à Londres en 1950.

- « Parmi les premiers à entrer dans cet enfer » : L’historienne Annette Wiervorka rappelle ces propos en introduction de son livre 1945. La découverte paru récemment aux éditions du Seuil. Les deux correspondants de guerre juifs sont « parmi les premiers à entrer dans cet enfer ».

Né en septembre 1910 à Hambourg d’un père français et d’une mère juive allemande, Eric Schwab arrive à Paris au début des années 1930. Il fait ses débuts comme photographe de mode et de plateaux de cinéma. Lorsque la seconde guerre mondiale éclate, il est mobilisé dans le nord de la France et participe brièvement aux combats. Il est fait prisonnier en juin 1940 dans la fameuse poche de Zuydcoote (Nord) avec des milliers d’autres soldats qui n’ont pas pu échapper à la déferlante des troupes allemandes.

Few details are known about this part of his life. What is known is that he managed to escape from a prisoner train bound for Germany, returned to the Paris region and joined the Resistance. Annette Wierviorka tracked him down in 1944 on the banks of the Loire, where he fought alongside the French Forces of the Interior.

- Journey by jeep to the concentration camp world : After the liberation of Paris, Schwab worked for AFP from September 1944. Accredited with the American army, he became a war correspondent and followed the progress of the Allied troops. His meeting with Meyer Levin in early 1945 was a turning point. It was the start of a great friendship and a journey that would take them into the world of concentration camps in their "Spirit of Alpena" jeep.

The first camp they discovered at the beginning of April 1945 was Ohrdruf, an annex of Buchenwald, near the town of Gotha, now in the German state of Thuringia. Curiously," points out the historian specialising in the Shoah, "there are no photographs of Schwab at this camp". Why wouldn't Schwab have documented this first camp? The mystery undoubtedly lies in archives that have disappeared or not yet been unearthed.

The itinerary of the two war correspondents then took them further into Germany, to the camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, Leipzig-Thekla and Terezin.

Schwab's first known photographs were taken in Buchenwald and Dachau: a close-up of the gate of the first camp with the terrible inscription "Jedem das Seine" ("To each what he deserves"), emaciated faces, frightened looks, emaciated bodies, the living looking like recumbents, piles of corpses, the doors of a crematorium. In around twenty photos, some of them almost unbearable, he describes the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps. He photographs the inhumanity of barbarity.

- He brought the horror of the camps to the front pages of the newspapers. : The photo of a "Dying Dysenteric" (above) is appalling. It shows a man's upper body, his gaze absent, frozen almost as if in death. The magazine Franc-Tireur published this photo, taken around 12 April 1945, on its front page on 27 April 1945. Another photograph taken in the Leipzig-Thekla camp also made the headlines: that of an unidentified man sitting with his head in his hands, facing a corpse lying a few metres away.

At Buchenwald, Schwab found resistance fighters and journalists who had worked for the underground press during the Occupation among the internees.A photograph of seven survivors shows two former members of the Havas agency: Maurice Nègre, who was to become director general of the new AFP three times between 1946 and 1954, and Christian Ozanne, who is wearing the striped trousers worn by prisoners.

- Souffrance et espoir : In Dachau, there was both horror and hope.Schwab's portraits speak volumes about the suffering of the men and women. A prisoner holds out his arm, on which a number has been carved into the flesh. A prisoner in a striped jacket talks to someone identified as a woman handed over to the camp brothel. Hope is reborn with a group of Frenchmen watching the raising of the tricolour flag bearing the cross of Lorraine. The first mass is celebrated by the camp priests.

After the horror of Dachau, the two war correspondents witnessed the capture of Itter Castle in Austria, where French politicians and military authorities had been interned.The Germans had assembled there an impressive gallery of ministers, generals, diplomats and political leaders.

They include two former Council presidents, Edouard Daladier, who signed the Munich agreements, and Paul Reynaud; several generals, including General Gamelin, commander of the French army that suffered defeat in 1940, and General Weygand, minister in the Vichy government;Léon Jouhaux, General Secretary of the CGT; Marie-Agnès Cailliau, sister of General de Gaulle; tennis player Jean Borotra, the "leaping Basque" who was one of the famous "Four Musketeers" who won the Davis Cup in the pre-war years.

The castle in the Austrian Tyrol was liberated on 5 May 1945. On that day, Schwab produced a fine series of portraits of these personalities posing in the company of their liberators.

The last leg of the journey takes the two men to the camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt in German), near the German border, now in the Czech Republic. Just a few days before the end of the war, the region was in chaos. The population fled as Soviet troops advanced into the American-controlled zone.

Most of the camps have been liberated. Eric Schwab is still looking for his mother Elsbeth. At the entrance to Terezin, he wandered off to the barracks. He returned a little later accompanied by a little woman, then aged 56, who had escaped death and was looking after the surviving children. It was a moment of intense emotion. It seems that out of modesty he did not want to photograph his mother. Or if he did, the photos were not published.

After Terezin, "the paths of Eric Schwab and Meyer Levin diverged", notes Annette Wieviorka. The former achieved his goal of finding his mother alive. The second will continue his investigation into the annihilation of the Jewish people.

Visual evidence of the horror of concentration camps was widely disseminated from 1945 onwards.But Eric Schwab did not immediately enjoy the fame of other photographers who documented the liberation of the camps. Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller and George Rodger were much better known at the time.

- Photographs mostly unsigned : As is often the case for an agency photographer, his photos were reproduced in the press, but not signed. Little is known about his face. In her book, Annette Wieviorka reproduces a rare self-portrait in which he poses in the uniform of a war correspondent, with a 6x6 Rolleiflex silver camera.

It would be several years before Schwab's talents were recognised, particularly the quality of his framing and the strength of his portraits. His photographs became icons of a terrible period in human history.

Photo historian Clément Chéroux believes that as a Jew, he photographed "the suffering of his own people". "As the son of a deportee, it was obviously his own mother's martyrdom that he perceived through her survivors", he writes in his book Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis (1933-1939) published by Marval.

- From Germany to New York : An exhibition of his photographs, organised by AFP, the National Archives and the National Resistance Museum in Champigny-sur-Marne, paid tribute to him in 2004.

His photographic work was catalogued and brought to light by Mikael Levin, Meyer's son, who reconstructed the itinerary of the two men in his book War Story and made it possible to identify the photos in the AFP archives: "Mikael is the transmitter of his father's work, but also of Schwab's," points out Annette Wieviorka. Many of his photos are in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

After the war, Eric Schwab left France with his mother and settled in New York in 1946.For a few years, he continued to work for AFP, on lighter subjects.A jazz enthusiast, he documented the streets of Broadway, the jazz clubs of Harlem and the sea bathing at Coney Island. AFP's holdings include some photos of pianist Nat King Cole taken by Schwab during a concert at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in 1950.

Eric Schwab left AFP in the early 1950s.He went on to work for various United Nations agencies in New York and Geneva, including the World Health Organisation.He travelled widely and took a particular interest in the plight of refugees. One of his photographs, entitled "Refugees in the Punjab", taken in India in 1951, was selected for the legendary photo exhibition The Family of Man in New York in 1955.

He apparently left no account of his discovery of the camps and his reunion with his mother, who died in 1962. Eric Schwab died in 1977 at the age of 67.