On the Death of Jews : Photographs and History

**“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 (Liep____ája), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Šk____éde) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims’ bodies tumbling into the pit.__ "In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews, the majority of whom were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The murderers took pictures of the December killings. These photographs are among the very rare pictures from the first period of the extermination, during which more than a million 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 the images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt"-- Provided by publisher

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.

In this trenchant meditation on photographs from an atrocity in Latvia during the Holocaust, Nadine Fresco argues for the vital importance of photographs-and nontraditional sources more broadly-for understanding the Holocaust.