Overview

“A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures…”—L’Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepája), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Škéde) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims’ bodies tumbling into the pit.

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9781789209242

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Reviews

Praise for the French edition: Demonstrating with rigor the perversity of revisionism, in particular its biased use of sources, [Fresco] also reveals intellectual genealogy. Le Monde A meticulous and shocking investigation of eight horrific pictures, in which the progressive revelation of the truth is reminiscent of Daniel Mendelssohn's Les disparus L'Arche Emotion, sensitivity, and suffering are not the enemies of precision or historical rigor and can sometimes make it more substantial, even more accurate. This is what Nadine Fresco manages to do with strength and brilliance, through a steady effort of writing, in this moving book. Politis It is on the basis of these terrible photos that Nadine Fresco will examine the persecution to which the Jews have been subjected over the centuries in order to achieve the unspeakable murderous madness of the Shoah. ArtPress Nadine Fresco addresses the major problems posed today by the history of genocide: responsibility and implementation of the decision, the abundance of countries where these massacres were perpetrated, the extent of extermination, and remembrance, particularly in German society after the Second World War. L'Ours

Author Information

Nadine Fresco is a French historian and an honorary researcher at the National Center for Scholarly Research in Paris. She is the author of Fabrication d’un antisémite (1999), and La Mort des juifs (2008), a collection of texts in which On the Death of Jews: Photographs and History first appeared. She is co-editor of the scholarly journal Le Genre humain and co-editor, with Martine Leibovici, of Anne-Lise Stern’s Le Savoir-déporté. Camps, histoire, psychanalyse (2004).

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