Sometimes death is a welcomed friend, for it can whisk you away from the pain, agony, and horror you might be immersed in. William Brasse met this friend seventy years too late to save him from the memories that haunted him during those seventy years. For William Brasse was forced to photograph the Holocaust for the Nazis, and the scars it created in his psyche never went away, as the excerpt below from an article by Greg Goodsell shows.
Forced by the Nazis to document the atrocities at Auschwitz with his camera, photographer Wilhelm Brasse has passed away at the age of 94. His photographs live on as an example of one of humanity’s darker hours. Haunted by years by the photos he was forced to take, he took some satisfaction that his pictures were later used to convict the Nazis for war crimes.
Wilhelm Brasse was forced to take photographs of frightened children and victims of gruesome medical experiments mere moments from their deaths. More than 1.5 million people died at the notorious camp. Brasse was forced to relive those horrors, was considered a hero after he risked his life to preserve the harrowing photographs.
There were four other contenders. “We were five people. They went through everything with us – the laboratory skills and the technical ability with a camera. I had the skills as well as being able to speak German, so I was chosen.”
A daily parade filed through his makeshift photographic studio. Each day he took so many pictures that another team of prisoners was assembled to develop the pictures.
One especially horrific story of his time at the infamous death camp was the time the diabolical Dr. Josef Mengele requested Brasse to take a photograph of a man’s Garden of Eden tattoo. The man was immediately killed afterwards, and later saw that Mengele had carved the tattoo of the man from his body to have it stretched into a picture frame.
Being forced to witness these attrocities might very well have been worse than suffering through them. By having the courage to hide negatives, Brasse was, whether he knew it or not, helping to fulfill the promise found in Ecclesiastes 12:14, “For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.” Brasse did what he could to right an outrageous wrong. We, too, can help protect God’s Chosen People by following the dictates of Psalm 122:6 – - by praying for the peace of Jerusalem!
To read Goodsell’s article in its entirety, go to the Catholic Online website.
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