Inherit The Truth

 

Pictured is Jane Hilton's wonderful portrait of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in yesterday's Observer Review. The subject of the photograph is one hundred years old. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen, coming to the UK after the Second World War to settle in north-west London, where she still lives. Without knowledge of context and her life story, we would simply be looking at a beautiful woman and gazing into strong intelligent eyes that speak of myriad, unfathomable depths of personal experience: a century of life and all which that implies and entails. What the image does not speak of is victim-hood or even, perversely, survival of the terrors that she experienced at the hands of the Nazis during her incarceration in the Second World War as a German Jew. Her gaze is defiantly of the present, a person very much in the now, and quietly reminding the world that true horror was once visited on the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and so many others that didn't fit within the strictures of the hideous ideologies of the Third Reich and who were slated for oblivion at the hands of the Nazis and their only too willing accomplices in the death camps.

With photographs, especially those that document actual historical events, context is everything. Intimate knowledge of the generation or subject of a particular image holds only insofar as the continued existence of the witness or the creator of that image. Taken at face value with no prior knowledge of the context within which an image is produced, the spectator can only speculate on the semantics of the picture in broad cultural terms, based on their personal history of exposure to other like images: but no specific meaning can be drawn without witness, either direct or recorded. The irony in the case of the Shoah is that the meticulousness of the Nazi regime led it to record in minute detail all of its activities, including some 40,000 photographs of the death camps from which Anita Lasker emerged at war's end. She left a personal record of this abomination in her 1996 book, "Inherit the Truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz". Along with the many other personal accounts now sitting as a matter of record, it gives context to the images that flooded the news over the years that followed, anchoring them in the true narrative of the events that took place at the time. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's benign and strong gaze in Hilton's portrait is amplified by and also amplifies that narrative and the true history that lies beneath it.