Ep. 55- Holocaust Photographs with Hilary Earl and Valerie Hébert

In December 1941,  an SS man took a series of 12 photographs of an Einsatzgruppen killing in Latvia.  The negatives were stolen by a survivor who had copies made and retrieved them after the war.

In today’s episode, we explore what we can learn about the Holocaust from these photographs and, indeed, from photographs in general.  I talk with Hillary Earl and Valerie Hébert who have written in depth about these images.

Hilary Earl is a professor of history at Nipissing University.

Valerie Hébert is a professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University.

Hébert, Valerie (ed). Framing the Holocaust (2025)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Whitman born. And today we are talking about Holocaust photography. is photographs of events of Holocaust using one particular event, I think as a vehicle to talk about what we can learn from photographs. What do they say about all of the different people involved, whether they be perpetrators, victims or bystanders, ⁓ and, how we look at them, ⁓ as.

as scholars, but also as the general public. And so with me, I have ⁓ the editor of an excellent edited volume ⁓ on this entitled Framing the Holocaust, photographs of a mass shooting in Latvia, 1941, Valerie Hebert, and also one of the contributors and someone who was working on these photographs as well as a documentary ⁓ relating to these events, ⁓ Hilary Earle. So Hilary, Valerie, thanks so much for coming on.

Hilary Earl (00:59)
Thanks for having us, Wayman. Thanks.

Valerie (00:59)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (01:01)
Can you both start, I guess, just by telling us how you got interested in this particular topic or how you came on to these photographs?

Hilary Earl (01:11)
Sure, I'll start. start. ⁓ So I've been working on Holocaust photographs, particularly perpetrator photographs for a very long time, ⁓ over 20 years, in fact. ⁓ I work on the Einsatzgruppen ⁓ execution, so on perpetrators. And I work on motive. And we at our university, when I first got there about 20 years ago, I'm at a little tiny university in Northern Ontario.

and we had a Holocaust survivor come to our university and she used some of the perpetrator photographs in her talk and ⁓ the photographs had absolutely nothing to do with her own experience. She was actually from a part of Romania ⁓ where the Einsatzgruppen weren't active and she was in fact deported in a way that ⁓ didn't involve the SS. But she used the photographs as a way to shock the audience.

And it got me thinking about how photographs are used. She used photographs of naked women in particular, the ⁓ Shkede Beach photos she used as well as some of the other photographs. And so I decided to start thinking about photographs and I incorporated them into my teaching. ⁓ then I gave a paper, I think, at Lessons and Legacies years ago about the Einsatzgruppen photographs and trying to understand them.

and how to teach them. And so I've been thinking about perpetrator photographs for a very long time, for well over 20 years. It kind of intersects with my own research as well. yeah. Well.

Valerie (02:54)
first became interested in history because of photographs. was, I absolutely am certain it was my grandfather's time life coffee table book of 20th century photographs that eight, nine year old me looking at, this was how I first encountered history. was through the image. And I maintained an interest in history through high school and then I ended up ⁓ taking history degree for undergrad. And for me,

photographs were always kind of a mental shorthand for these big historical events. ⁓ But then once I began teaching ⁓ Holocaust history in particular, I felt very ambivalent about how to use these in the classroom because, and a lot of this came from my mentor in Holocaust history, Jacques Kornberg, who Hillary also worked with and knew quite well, and he had lost family in the Holocaust and ⁓

He thought these kinds of photographs, it was indecent to show photographs of ⁓ suffering Jewish bodies or dead Jewish bodies in the classroom. And I took that lead. And so although I would show other kinds of photographs in my teaching, when I'm teaching on the world wars or what have you, that felt like a line I shouldn't cross. At the same time, personally,

I kept gravitating back to these photographs because I thought there's something here, there's something. ⁓

compelling about these images that can access ⁓ aspects of this history that other sources can't, or that can help us access aspects of this history that other sources can't. so, ⁓ eventually, I started off researching in trials and justice issues, but I came back to photography because I had this nagging question about how do we use these photographs? What is it that they can offer us? How is it that we can ⁓

⁓ use them responsibly and ⁓ what is it that they can tell us about this, this history that other sources can't. And so I convened a workshop at the Holocaust Museum in 2017 and it brought scholars from all over the world who were in one way or another connected to ⁓ the world of atrocity photography, not necessarily just Holocaust photography.

And we all came from different disciplinary backgrounds, historians, was a legal scholar, were scholars of literature, so on. And in the course of that workshop, we realized that when we all were looking at the same images, that's when the conversations would really flourish because ⁓ as a result of our training, we brought different kinds of questions to these sources and

And these photographs were like this bottomless well. You could bring any number of questions to them, any number of different perspectives to them, and they had something to give back. There was something to obtain from these depending on the questions we brought to them. And so that's where the idea for the book came from is there was this series of photographs, which in itself was a very rare source to have this connected series of 12 photos of.

a single event where we can identify some of the people. ⁓ We use that as this ⁓ anchor point wherein all these different ⁓ scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds brought their analytical energies to bear on them.

Waitman Beorn (06:36)
Yeah, I I want to get to the volume and I want to get to the history of the photographs. But some of the things that you've already mentioned, you me want to sort of ask us to take a step back into sort of what is the history of the use of Holocaust photographs, you know, because in a certain way, you know, the Holocaust is the sort of cliche. It's one of the most documented.

genocides in history, particularly photographically. But the photographs are not evenly distributed across all different facets of the event. They're very sort of clustered around specific things like liberation, for example, or these antihistorical killings. And also, you point out, think one of the things that challenges us about photographs is that on the one hand, they seem self-evident.

You know, there's a photograph, there it is. can see, you know, it's, it's, it's real. It's accurate. I'm using scare quotes here for the audience. ⁓ but on the other hand, they're, they're absolutely not, you know, without a great deal of, of context, which is one of the things that the vine brings out really well. and I will, that I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about. So can you, can you talk about a little bit, you know, how these photographs have been used? ⁓ you know, you mentioned the visual turn, you know, in the

in the book, suggests a sort of new way of looking, which again, which suggests an old way of looking or not looking. So can you sort of walk us through, through that.

Hilary Earl (08:09)
So, Paval, before you answer that question, I just want to, I just was reminded, tweaked by something that Paul Jaskot had said. And, Waittman, you've worked a very long time with Paul, I think, on your ⁓ geographies project. But years and years and years ago, Paul used to complain at Lessons and Legacies, ⁓ or at the Summer Institute at Northwestern, when he delivered the photography workshop, he would always say, damn historians, damn historians.

All you do is put up a photo and say, see, see the truth. See, that's what you see. And it just reminds me like it's the old, it's the old way of doing it. Right? So if you picked up a book prior to this visual turn, you'd flip through it. Like what I did in my book, you know, that's now, you know, 15 years old where here it's show and tell. So Otto Ohlendorf, here he is on trial. Here's a picture of Otto Ohlendorf or, know, here is a picture of

all the documents from the trial or whatever it's meant to represent. ⁓ Photographs ⁓ in our field, at least in perpetrator studies and legal history, certainly were not analyzed as documents themselves. They were just used ⁓ as a method of reinforcing something that you've said already. ⁓ But I think Val can speak more about the visual term, your more technical question.

Valerie (09:30)
Thank

Yeah, well, I can I can echo a lot of what you said. think, know, history, we weren't trained in how to use photographs. You know, they were kind of an afterthought that you would establish the narrative with textual sources or, you know, eyewitness testimony, that kind of thing. And then the photograph was like confirmation, right, as opposed to the other way around, where the photograph itself is also approached as a source unto itself with all the complexities and pitfalls and and ⁓

uncertainties that any other source might. So I think once there was, you know, there was a growing recognition that these sources were things to be approached on their own terms and, and with a view to like understanding how this source was made and that that shapes how it is that we try and understand it. And so when we think about, you know, how Holocaust photography has been used,

Historically, part of the answer is how historians have used it, people writing this history. And I think for most of the years between the end of the Holocaust and scholarship today, it was in the way that Hillary described that it's sort of like they're dropped in at the end as opposed to the starting point of inquiry. But I think also, so in that sense, they were vastly underused, right?

their narrative potential, right? Or their evidentiary potential or the complexity of what it is that they capture that was very much ⁓ underappreciated. On the other hand, certain photographs were overused, right? That certain images like the liberation photographs, like the Warsaw boy with his hands raised, ⁓ even like ⁓ that photograph in the series of Shigeta Beach images that we're discussing, the four women and little girl lined up, appear

over and over and over again in publications and museum exhibits as a kind of shorthand to articulate something much larger, much faster, much more complex. ⁓ And so it's like this tension between us not really having taken the time to properly critically ⁓ analyze, spend the long time necessary to

fully grasp what these sources might offer us. On the other hand, sprinkling them around our scholarship and our public facing history ⁓ endeavors in a way that they become stand-ins for things in both cases. Their actual ⁓ historical value ⁓ or narrative value is...

underappreciated.

Hilary Earl (12:27)
I think though, I think adding to that Val that I'm just thinking in the teaching context and with the kind of newer generations of young people and how important visualization is for their modes of learning and how radically I think ⁓ modern technology has transformed the way that we ⁓ have access to a lot of these images. So ⁓ students can, you know, look things up.

anytime they want, videos or things that are uploaded and platforms, I guess, like Pinterest and Access Forum. Like I go to Access Forum all the time to find photographs of World War II that I'm interested in. I might not like the discussion, but there's a lot of really interesting photographs that are out there. ⁓ So I think that along with this kind of new appreciation of

the value of photographs as a historical source or ⁓ as ⁓ a medium of their own. There's also something going on, I think culturally that has also propelled our interest ⁓ as scholars in using ⁓ visual imagery. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (13:39)
Well, and there's something else I think, as I, you with my new project, visual, visualizing the camp in a 3D sort of reconstruction, I've also been using lots of photographs. But, you know, one of the things that they really challenge us to do is consider ambiguity and uncertainty and actually what you don't know, you know, in a way that I think is...

Valerie (13:42)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (14:06)
in a way that lots of folks don't think about photographs because they think about them as a sort of an quote accurate, you know, representation of the world. But, you know, we often don't know exactly what it is that I'm looking at here. And one of the things that the book does and we'll get to that, you know, but I think is really interesting that I've never seen done before is you actually do sort of a genealogy of captions, which is really cool because again, like when you go, even when you go to an archive, you know,

You look at the photograph and has a caption. You're like, well, that's what it is because that's what the archive says it is. ⁓ but captions themselves are, created by people or, or institutions or organizations based on limited accurate or inaccurate information. And it's, it's really interesting to sort of see how different institutions, ⁓ either come up with their own way or they're following other people's, you know, sort of the way they've done it before and just sort of regurgitating.

what other people have said. I thought that it's really interesting. And of course, there's also the question of cropping and image modification. mean, one of the, in the book for our listeners, this is a slight detour, but it's really useful. There's a very famous photograph. It's in the book, but it's everywhere of a shooting in Yvonne Gorod where essentially it shows an individual pointing a rifle at a woman who's running away with a child.

Many of you probably have seen this in various forms. It's one of these archetypal photographs that Valerie and Hillary were talking about, but it's often not completely shown. It's often cropped to just highlight this kind of very intimate one-on-one kind of event showing this man praying to shoot these two people. But actually the full photograph has several other people at the far side. And then in the middle is this man.

and ready to shoot women. But then there's also another group people at the far side of the picture who either have been shot or will be shot shortly. And it changes completely what's going on in the photograph, as well as the sort of emotional impact or rhetorical or narrative impact of the photograph. that sort of is, I guess, neither here nor there, but it's mentioned. Maybe we should go to the book and talk about the historical event itself. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah.

Hilary Earl (16:30)
Can I just speak to that though for a second? I

think it's a really, so I'm a historian, but I'm also making a film, as you know, about these photographs. And Valerie is one of the key ⁓ protagonists in the documentary. ⁓ you know, ⁓ the Ivana Grad photograph ⁓ was used by a colleague of mine, ⁓ Michael Prisin, who's a filmmaker in France.

Valerie (16:34)
Thank

Hilary Earl (16:58)
who did a documentary about the Einsatzgruppen. And he is very faithful to history and he makes very good documentaries. And the front cover of his ⁓ DVD for that documentary, which is on Netflix and it's in all kinds of places, I think, educationally, he's used the cropped image of the soldier shooting what appears to be the woman and the child at close range. ⁓ And I think that it highlights the

the emotional weight that we can elicit, I guess, from manipulating photographs. And I think that we're going to have more conversations about this as AI probably throws a spanner in everything that we do as scholars, including the use of photographs. But I did want to just highlight it, that people, know, good people, people who have good meaning, ⁓ can manipulate how we feel about something.

just by cutting off an inch around the frame of the body.

Waitman Beorn (17:57)
I mean, it's very much like

sort of an analog Ken Burns effect, you know, where it sort of zooms in and you're like, you know, the Civil War story is now even more intimate because you've zoomed in on the face of the person that's talking or whatever. Can we talk a little bit about the background, right? So what you have are a series of 12 photographs ⁓ from one Einsatzgruppen shooting in Latvia. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of what the background is to this before we talk about how we look at them?

Hilary Earl (18:01)
Yep, exactly.

Exactly.

Want to go ahead, Val, or you want? Sorry, your question is about the photos themselves or the history of the... Okay.

Waitman Beorn (18:32)
Yeah, I mean, what's the what's the what's the historical context of these?

What are we looking at? Because obviously our listeners can go online maybe and find the photographs, but we don't really know what they're what they're what they're looking at.

Hilary Earl (18:42)
Right, right.

So I'll just be brief. won't give too many details. So the photographs are the result of Operation Barbarossa. So the invasion, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941. And the very rapid and speedy progress that the German military and SS, the Einsatzgruppen make in making their way to the Baltics.

And they're very interested in the Baltics for military reasons, because of course they're on the sea and there's a very important naval base on the coast of Latvia that the Germans want access to to fight the war. And so the German military makes its way to Latvia by June 29th. So in about a week's time, they're there and they already start almost immediately rounding up and killing Jewish men in the community.

And unlike in other places, I suppose, the progress is really quite quick. ⁓ Jewish men are killed in the first three weeks of July into September in some cases. And then who's left in the community, but women and children, women and children are, you know, rounded up and killed in the December action, which are the focus of the photographs. So the photographs really are ⁓ a representation of

one action that took place on one day in December of 1941 after the German military had defeated Latvia and had defeated this particular town of Liepaja and had taken control of the naval base in Liepaja. And then maybe Val could say something about the photograph for maybe.

Valerie (20:33)
Yeah, I can add a little more on the photo. So it's these 12 photographs. We believe they were all taken on the same day of this three-day shooting action, 15th of December, 1941. And over the course of that three-day action, 2,749 Jews were shot on the beach, mostly women and children for the reasons that Hillary said. It's because the men were killed earlier in the summer, mostly around July. We don't know

Waitman Beorn (20:33)
Thank

Valerie (21:02)
with absolute certainty who the photographer was. They are often attributed to this man, Carl, sometimes it's written Carl Emil Straat, but it's like what you were describing before, Waetman, about archival captions of images is that name appeared and then like we're left wondering were other archives simply copying each other in naming him because it's unclear just ⁓ if he was.

actually the photographer, there were certain eyewitnesses that placed him on the scene with a camera, but other eyewitnesses placed other men there with a camera. Wolfgang Kugler and Eric Huencke were also named as ⁓ men on the scene who were taking photographs. And then complicating the story even further was that they were, the negatives were found in the possession of a man we know only by his surname, Sobek. So.

They were all, all these men were part of the SS occupation of Leopold and they had so in the occupation officials had employed a local Jewish man by the name of David Zivcon and he did odd jobs for them, you know. And this one day he was asked to install an electrical outlet in this man Sobek's quarters.

And as he tells it, as Zipcon tells it, he opened a drawer, saw these ⁓ negatives, understood that he had understood, you he knew that there had been this shooting action and realized that's what these photograph negatives were of. Indeed, recognize some of the people captured, smuggled the negatives out in the same building where he was working. There was an

operating photography studio run by a friend of his who was commissioned to do work for the occupation. Had prints made, ⁓ smuggled the negatives back in undetected and then preserved these 12 prints miraculously himself. The Zivkans survived. There were just a handful of Jews that survived the German occupation in Liepāja until the Soviets arrived to liberate.

And it was at that point that he handed these photographs over. we have conflicting testimony. Estraught was eventually tried for his ⁓ crimes while part of the occupation in Latvia. But the issue, although the existence of these photographs was acknowledged in the course of the proceedings, they didn't follow down.

trying to identify absolutely who had taken the photographs. They simply acknowledged that they existed. And it was more just as corroboration that the shooting had happened. And so we're left with this question about why they were taken at all. again, there's, there's claims that it was because there was a military delegation on site at the time of the shooting. And so this was to be documented as an exemplary shooting action. That's one explanation. Another explanation is that.

all of the men in uniform in these photographs. throughout the whole series, we see men in uniform armed, but they're all Latvian. They were all the, the men captured, the ⁓ perpetrator figures in these images are all the Latvian auxiliaries. And so there was a theory that the photographs were taken in order to try and incriminate them. ⁓ But when you look at this whole series, and it's one of the

things that makes this collection so valuable ⁓ is that the arc, it's a connected series of images and you can trace a number of different narrative arcs throughout the 12. Like overall, it is the sequential steps of a mass shooting action where you see people being brought to a place, you see them, you know, broken down into smaller groups, you know, the undressing, the walking, the standing on the edge of the pit, the

and bodies lying dead. So overall you sort of see how a shooting action like this would be organized and carried out. But then within that larger narrative are these, you know, subset stories. There's only 12 photographs, but half of them focus on women who, and yes, it was a shooting that involved mainly women and children. That part is not in itself ⁓ noteworthy, but in half of these images, the women are

either ⁓ partially undressed or entirely naked. there's ⁓ the overtone to the images is a sexualized one where either the body is ⁓ sexual, like an object of desire or an object of ridicule, but in either way, it's the women's sexualized bodies that are clearly a focus. In a full third of the images, we see children.

captured in moments of abject terror. Those moments where children realized what lay in store for them, only moments in the future. And so to my mind, you know, none, like you couldn't, maybe a single image like that could be accidental, you know, could be happenstance, could be just, you know, ⁓ random. But when you see that these, you know,

themes within this larger, you know, visual story. To my mind, this suggests some kind of intention, some preoccupation on the part of the photographer. And that all, you know, sort of comes back to some unofficial mandate, right? That this was just some individual's personal project to create some kind of souvenir of this event.

and in a way that fed particular kinds of appetites.

Waitman Beorn (27:18)
Well, there's there's definitely, I mean, as you point out, I mean, he he I'm assuming it's a he, you know, which is a whole other question. But I mean, the gender piece of it is obviously really central. I'm going to assume it's a he, you know, is following sometimes the same group, too. So, I mean, there is this, you know, almost this narrative of him walking through the process. And as you say, he's building a narrative of like, here's what happened in the beginning, the middle and the end.

You know, but there's also, there are some moments that are clearly forced posing. And there are other moments where he's just sort of capturing the action as it's happening. And I think all these things are really interesting to think about in terms of the motivation, right? Because one of the challenges of photographs is, you know, taken by themselves, we just have a scene of something and we don't necessarily know.

Valerie (27:59)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (28:16)
why, how, who, or for what purpose, you know, these photographs are being taken. But in this case, it seems, as you point out very clear, that there's something going on here. And it's a proud moment in a certain sense. It's not something that the cameraman is looking away from.

Hilary Earl (28:36)
It's also, I just have to, I just want to reinforce something for the audience that I think they need to maybe hear a second time. I don't think we realize or everyone realizes how miraculous is that we have the photographs to begin with. They were taken. I'm sure there were probably other ⁓ SD men along the line who have taken photos that have never been uncovered. But, you know, just statistically.

90 % of Latvia's Jews were murdered. So there were 70,000 Latvian Jews, 90 % were murdered. In the town of Liepaja itself, there were only 25 survivors, Jewish survivors. And that David Zivkon, the guy who was hired by the SD to be a mechanic, is the one who found the photographs, fought on his feet to take them to his buddy who was still alive, who wasn't going to turn them in, who could then replicate these, and he then buried them.

And then he's one of the survivors. And then the Soviets come into this town and say, we're looking for evidence of German atrocities in your community. Do you have any? Oh, look, here's some photographs that I have. And then they go into the Soviet archive and they're not found until 1967 by a German scholar, Schoenbaum, think was his name, Schoenbrenner.

Valerie (29:54)
Sean Berner.

Hilary Earl (29:56)
who found the photos and published some of them in his, in this little slim volume of photographs from the war. So, I mean, I think that like the photographs themselves are one thing, but that we actually can even look at them because of this, you know, ⁓ series of events that are really kind of miraculous in themselves. ⁓ I think it's important to know. ⁓ Look at the content is another thing.

Waitman Beorn (30:23)
Absolutely. mean, and again, just the the courage that he had to to steal them and and then have to figure out. mean, like, you know, that's like some some Hollywood level kind of movie level ⁓ bravery to sort of figure out a way to sneak in and sneak out. know, and I think one of the things that listening to what you just said here, that reminds me, you know, that one of the powers of photographs, whether it's sort of ⁓

unintentional or unfair is that when you're presented with a photograph, it does have a power that even a testimony doesn't have. And that's not to say that it actually is more valuable, but whenever we see photograph, in just anything in life, when we see photographic evidence of something, if you say so-and-so was being racist at a party, that's bad. But if there's a picture of them being racist at a party,

that hits differently and requires a different engagement, a different response. And I think about that sometimes with our photographs, of violence against Jews, violence against people during the Holocaust. Obviously, we believe people when they say that this happened or when authorities document this happened, but the image of it. ⁓

is I guess just particularly damning in a way. It's inescapable even if we don't know perfectly all the details of it, if that makes sense.

Hilary Earl (31:55)
Yeah, know, Zipcon said in several interviews before he said that he recognized the people in some of the shots, right? And so his whole town has disappeared or the vast majority of his Jewish community has disappeared. And this is February. So it's February of 1942 when he's in Sobek's apartment fixing the electrical outlet.

Valerie (31:58)
you

Hilary Earl (32:21)
And so the ghetto is going to be, Leopold is going to be liquidated soon and everyone's going to be moved to Riga, to the ghetto there, any people that they're going to save. And so he's probably, you know, it's a desperate act too, I think. I think the timing really matters of when he found the photographs. You know, maybe if he had found them on December 31st or something, it might not have been the same response.

Waitman Beorn (32:46)
Well, it's funny because I just listening to you there, like I just finished reading for other reasons. ⁓ The Zalman Kudalski, ⁓ Sonderkommando of Auschwitz scrolls, right? The things that he left behind. And of course, throughout that and every one of them, he says, I'm writing this in part so that people remember that this happened. And if you find this, you know, here's people you can contact that can tell you the story. And so I wonder if that's exactly what you're saying where, you know, part of this is

is resistance, right? I mean, we're not talking about the photographs themselves, the propagating of them in the sense of creating a copy that can be found later is certainly an act of resistance ⁓ outside of the photographs.

Valerie (33:31)
And I think that highlights, to me, one of the really fascinating things about photographs is that they can have opposite meanings, that they are layered in their meanings, that they have different significations depending on when you're viewing it and why. I mean, for everything I described before about the content of these images, that they were, it seems, given the visual information available to us from them.

taken for these very prurient, self-serving ⁓ purposes, right? To add to the torment of these Jews in their last moments in order to preserve ⁓ images of women when they were most vulnerable for the personal gratification of the photographer. And there's testimony that the images were shared and traded. On the other hand,

And not years later, but in fact, like within months of that creation, right? Those images being created for those ⁓ deplorable ⁓ reasons, a member from the Jewish community recognizes them as ⁓ for their memorial potential, right? As evidence of what happened to his community and in this incredibly ⁓ brave act of resistance, you know?

at enormous risk to himself, makes every effort to preserve them so that they would be seen, right? The same things that concern us about looking at them are still there. And yet with this act of preservation, he's making the argument that in fact, no, more people need to see this, right? And so the same photograph, nothing changes about it. And yet it has like completely different ⁓ afterlives.

Hilary Earl (35:10)
It's the same as the spot group.

I think that's a really good point because it's the same motivation that the Zonderkommando in 1944 risked their lives to take the photos, right? They knew that it was the end and they wanted, they were going to be damn sure that someone they hoped saw what was going on.

Valerie (35:35)
Yeah,

and I mean and the other thing we haven't mentioned till now but you know it goes back to your point Hillary that you the rarity and the exceptionality of these photos is that the German authorities themselves understood just how volatile this kind of ⁓ Documentation was and so there were cameras all over the front and they made repeated efforts over and over and over again to prohibit their men from taking these kinds of Photographs and there were you know huge

know, direct orders, know, orders to if supervisors found, you know, they're meant to be in possession of these kinds of photos or making these kinds of photos to confiscate the film, to destroy the cameras. So, you know, even at the time that they were made, the person making them understood that this was a subversive act. ⁓ And so that, you know, that this even existed, like it shouldn't even from the Germans own perspective, this photograph should never have existed. And so it heightens the value even

even more that they ⁓ were discovered and preserved by a member of their victim group.

Waitman Beorn (36:43)
Well, sorry.

Hilary Earl (36:43)
I think that something more needs to be thought

about that though, because I think of Reinhard Wiener's film footage, the 92nd Leopold film footage. I'm not sure if the listeners know about it, but in July of 1941, Reinhard Wiener, who was a Creeks Marine stationed in Leopold, ⁓ took a series of pieces of film.

that amounted to about a minute and a half of an Einsatzgruppe in execution by the lighthouse where the men of Liepāya, the Jewish men of Liepāya were killed in the summer. And he ⁓ went to Yad Vashem, not to Yad Vashem, but to Tel Aviv in 1981 and he was interviewed by an Israeli ⁓ academic.

who asked him about that very question, Val, about, you know, weren't you, like, what did you do with this? Because he turned over the footage after the war in 1958 to the German prosecutors to use in the Grau trial. ⁓ And he said, no one ever said anything to me, ⁓ that I was allowed to take footage as long as I got permission from my CO to do it. And so he had his video camera at execution sites.

and sent the footage home to his mother without any trouble at all. And he held private screenings, he said, of that footage with buddies from his unit. So like on the one hand, think there's this, know, no, you can't take photos. But on the other hand, there seems to be some kind of leniency. ⁓

Valerie (38:20)
Yeah, and it's something that I've written about elsewhere. There's sort of this mismatch between the repeated and very clear orders to try and ⁓ stamp this practice out. ⁓ And yet it seems to be this toleration for it on the ground. But, know.

Waitman Beorn (38:39)
Well, I think one

of things that that, you know, I always ⁓ find again, and this is a perfect time to sort of bring it up because I think you sort of hinted at it a little bit is that sometimes and again, I'm not trying to put rose glasses, rose colored glasses on it, but sometimes people observe these events or even photograph these events, not because they are in favor of them, but because there's such a such a transgression against normality.

you know, that they sort of cannot look away. And again, I'm not suggesting that in even the most cases that this is the case. But when we have an atrocity photograph, you know, I remember when I was working on my first book and I went to Hamburg and at the Institute for Social Worship, they had a whole box full of photographs that people had sent in after the Wehrmacht exhibition in 1995 that they just didn't want to have anymore. you know, but they were just all loose, you know, floating around in this big cardboard box.

Valerie (39:29)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (39:36)
And some of them were, you know, of atrocities, but you had no, no idea whatsoever why that person had taken the photograph, whether it was to document because they thought it was awful or whether they thought it was great or whatever. Right. And so again, I think that's that that's something interesting, Hillary, that you bring up, you know, that the Vener will talk about the Vener film probably a little bit later as well. But clearly he had at least maybe developed, but at some point he had a reason to believe that his film was actually something that

he needed to turn over to document crime rather than something to hide because it was, you know, it was something that he was culpable in. But before we get to that, maybe, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, please.

Hilary Earl (40:09)
Yeah.

But wait, can I just say something further to that? Because I do

not, on one hand, yes, they're extraordinary. But on the other hand, I think if we look at history, there's ample evidence of trophy photographs of soldiers, know, like Guantanamo, ⁓ like the Canadians at, ⁓ where were they? Not Sudan. ⁓ Anyway, there's lots of atrocity photographs. Somalia.

Waitman Beorn (40:28)
for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Valerie (40:41)
Somalia.

Waitman Beorn (40:42)
I mean,

it's, course it's a whole genre. Um, you know, and I, and I think, I mean, the, Americans in the Philippines, um, there's a great book that just recently came out on that. I'm taking photographs of, of mass atrocities. And I, and and I think, again, it's just, it's always as you sort of have done, you know, good to problematize a little bit, you know, that every photograph without all the context that you are now bringing to it, we can't assume necessarily, um, the motivations though.

Hilary Earl (40:44)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (41:11)
We can, depending on how we read the photographs, which is what Valerie was talking about earlier, you know, the way that they are taken, you know, can then tell us something more about it. But if you just have, you know, like a distant shot of a shooting that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about why. But one of the things that you do in the book, I think it's really interesting and for our readers, interesting is, you know, what we would call reading against the grain, right? Where I guess...

reading with the grain is kind of just saying, this is clearly what's ⁓ depicted, you know, oftentimes from the perspective of the photographer, which oftentimes almost always is perspective of the perpetrator. ⁓ And without again, without trying to, ⁓ you know, put a positive spin on things as it were, or make ourselves feel somewhat better or that there's some kind of valorizing element to these photographs.

Valerie (41:42)
you

Waitman Beorn (42:08)
And what do the photographs tell us about the victims and the way that they reacted or experienced these events?

Valerie (42:21)
⁓ Well, you alluded to it earlier. There's two, again, we talk about like these sub narratives within this overall narrative arc of a single day's shooting. ⁓ He very clearly focused on two family groups, the Epstein's and the Grinfeld's, and followed them at various stages along this path towards their own ⁓ death. ⁓

And you know, we, and your question was like, how did Jews experience this? I mean, they experience this as family groups. It was women and children kept together ⁓ and, you know, sisters and their children, cousins, right? So they're, ⁓ but we also see them utterly vulnerable to the...

the men around them, right? The forced nakedness, not all women are naked, the young, beautiful ones are naked, right? Or the, know, unconventionally, you know, a woman who would not, you know, be seen as conventionally beautiful was also photographed, which, you know, suggests the image was taken in order to ridicule her. And so, you know, the forced nakedness, the forced proximity of

people to the dead. There's a photograph where, more than one, where they're lined up on the edge of this mass grave. The shooting has already been well underway. The grave is full of too many bodies to count. Capturing that about to die moment, that moment of unimaginable terror. ⁓

You know, and then in the case of the Grinfeld family, it's a mother and children and, you know, siblings. One is just an infant. The other one, very, you know, young girl following from that moment where we know from, you know, today from the layout of the geography of the site, you know, this would have been that point in their walk from the holding area to towards the mass grave. This would have been the moment where they would have looked up the beach and known.

seen the grave for themselves. They would have obviously been hearing shots and understood overall what was happening, but it's such a deliberate, intentional, ⁓ carefully chosen moment that the photographer, you know, ⁓ sought to capture this moment when the children realized they were next. And so you see, I think we can talk in quite abstract ways about Einsatzgruppen shootings, 1.5 million Jews, you know,

Baltics to Crimea, you know, forests, ⁓ steps, you know, ⁓ this place, that place, this date, that date. ⁓ but with these images, you see, ⁓ just how intimate that this, shooting was, ⁓ the, the control of it, right? The, the added layers of humiliation and terror and degradation that they

these women and children. And there were some men you see, some older men you see in the images that they had to endure between their arrival at the beach and when their turn came to be shot. And so it helps to flesh out in searing detail, in blistering detail, what that experience must have been like. At the same time, these photographs

have their own limitations, right? We don't hear anything through them. We know from other testimonies what people lost control of themselves in the face of this terror, cried out, collapsed. We don't get everything from photographs, but we get a lot more from them. And in particular, in following particular family groups through different stages of this ordeal.

⁓ we get a lot more than we do from just the raw statistics or the broad strokes description of what this phase of the Holocaust was about.

Hilary Earl (46:49)
I also think that the photographs provide a really important counter narrative to the perpetrator claims. You know, as someone who's worked on perpetrator testimony and who has listened deeply to what perpetrators say about their own experiences at these killing sites, ⁓ they claim that, you know, ⁓ that they're humane, that the way they kill people is humane and, you know, nothing out of the ordinary.

was observed. I think the photographs really, particularly of Ruben Grunfeld, there's two photographs I think of, I use them both in my teaching. ⁓ Ruben Grunfeld and then the photo of ⁓ the family standing facing the sea with his little sister, a little girl, ⁓ who clearly sees what's going to happen and what's going to become of her. ⁓ I think it very clearly depicts the terror in ⁓ people's

heads, minds, bodies ⁓ of that moment. ⁓ I think that's really important. And I, there is more research now too. think ⁓ Martin Dean has written a book recently about Babinyar and he does this kind of anthropological examination into witness testimony about the executions that took place in Babinyar, which of course is a much larger ⁓ massacre than what happens at Liepāja, but similar as well. And ⁓

the testimony talks about what people are saying and he uncovers all kinds of ⁓ evidence of suffering by the victims. And so I think that as we explore that topic in greater detail and use photographs and other kind of evidence that we can really get a much clearer picture of ⁓ those experiences and really

try and bury what it is the perpetrators claimed. I think it's important. Ethically, I think it's very important.

Waitman Beorn (48:49)
Yeah, I think it's, had a Chad Gibbs on here a couple of months ago and we talked about, you know, we should all write a book about continuing epic myths of the Holocaust. And one of them is this idea of sort of the, you know, the lambs, the slaughter, everything was humane and calm and collected, even at the killing centers, you know, and it wasn't there either. And I think one of the things that, another one that I would put on there that these photographs I think speak to is the sort of why didn't people run away kind of thing.

⁓ you know, and you see, you know, here you are with your child or your older relative and, know, like, and you're in this big open space surrounded by guys with guns. mean, like, you know, what, reasonably speaking, what are you, what are you going to do? And, and, and of course, and of course people did, right? mean, like, it's not photographed, but I mean, but it also, it makes it more understandable why you don't because you're with your family. I mean, what does it mean if you run and, and they're left be, I mean, like, and of course part of the.

Valerie (49:16)
Yeah.

Hilary Earl (49:29)
Some people did run away. That's the truth.

Yep. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (49:45)
⁓ the, the evil ingenuity of the whole process is it takes place relatively quickly. So you don't have time to really sit there and weigh out, you know, all these different pros and cons of various courses of action, that kind of stuff. you mentioned ethics and I want to talk about that a little bit because it's something that I think I'm, I'm challenged by, ⁓ in these photographs as well. Like when I was, when I was picking photographs for the book,

Valerie (50:05)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (50:10)
Um, there's a series of really awful photographs with the pogrom in L'Evive in July, 1941 of, of predominantly women being abused in the street and that kind of stuff. And I was trying to decide which, which photograph to use if any. Um, you know, and of course there's sort of two, two schools of thought generally about, about the use of photographs. And one is this is history. It's important. It's, it tells us something important that we need to know. Um, and it needs to be seen no matter how

sort of graphic or ugly it is. Another says, these people didn't, these people were being photographed literally at the worst moment in their life. They didn't consent to this. ⁓ that publishing their photographs in any sort of, whether it's in teaching or whatever, without their consent is sort of victimizing them again. ⁓ Also museum exhibits have the same conversations.

And I'm obviously not casting as Persians in any direction. I'm just curious what your thoughts are about sort of how you might use these. Hillary, have your pieces in the book is about teaching, but also just in research. And as we move past sort of the photograph as illustration of our narrative point, how do we deal with these issues of when is it appropriate? Is it appropriate to use these photographs or publish them or disseminate them?

Hilary Earl (51:37)
Well, given that both Valerie and I are using these ⁓ in both of our mediums in a published book, and I intend to use all 12 photographs in the documentary that I'm making. And I think Valerie and I share a view about this, that it's a whole, it's a collection ⁓ of images. And I think, mean, I think what do ethics mean around that for historians? I mean, it means that you...

You don't treat the photos as show and tell. You treat the photos as subjects. You treat the people in the photographs as subjects. ⁓ You provide the context of the images. ⁓ You don't just put them on the internet without, you know, anything. They're used in a way to ⁓ help educate, ⁓ you know, in the case of the documentary, help educate a wider audience about...

you know, what it meant, what it meant to ⁓ be a victim of German violence during World War II, what happened to people, what happened to children, what happened to families, how people were humiliated. I think those are really, really important things for people to understand. Just pushing it under the rugs and saying, you know, don't look, I think is highly, problematic. But I also think it, you know, they need

context, they need explanation, they need ⁓ support. I visually, I think there's ways in the documentary, especially where ⁓ I can use the images of naked women and not gaze on them and not hold the shot, right? You can talk about it and show it, but without, you know, it being a lingering shot in some ways. ⁓ And I know Valerie has very particular views about I mean, her whole ⁓ beginning chapter is about should we look or shouldn't we look?

And I think that she's worked through that beautifully and would probably like to talk about it.

Valerie (53:37)
Yeah, I think just even as a starting point is understanding that there are ethical stakes involved, right? That they are ethically fraught sources and understanding, you know, why and, and wait, when you alluded to it, some of the key aspects of that, you know, photograph, were taken without consent of the people photographed in, you know, moments of utter vulnerability or humiliation or nakedness or, know, the list goes on.

they were taken for these, know, ⁓ oftentimes, you know, prurient self-serving reasons, right? And, you know, the geometry of any photograph means that when we look at it, we stand in the same place that the perpetrator stood, right? Just as a function of how a camera operates, you know, to produce the image that comes down to us. ⁓ And so we, in a very real way, reenact the scene, right?

where we are sort of reviving that moment of humiliation and degradation. And so I think even just coming to these images with that awareness is, you know, the first step to ⁓ working with them in a way that's ethically informed. I think too, I would, well, a couple of things. You know, I come down on the side of we should look and in fact have an obligation to look.

And ⁓ one of the key arguments in support of that position, I think, is the fact that Jews themselves at enormous risk to themselves, you know, with Herculean effort, ensured that there was a photographic record of what befell them, right? Not just diaries, not just letters, not just testimony, but they also understood the power of this medium. And

ensured that there was a visual record. And does that not also bestow on us a responsibility, you know, to engage with these sources that they worked so hard to create and preserve? And the other thing I would say is I think perhaps there's this misconception out there that, you know, to be, to be,

ethical or to be ethically, ⁓ you know, ⁓ pacified, right, in looking at these photographs that we would feel comfortable, right? That, you know, to work with something ethically is to sort of reduce the conflict we feel over it. And I don't think that's true at all. And I think, you know, if we're looking, you know, for some, like to be soothed, you know, in our interaction with these images, we're barking up the wrong tree.

There is still a way to engage these images in a ⁓ critical, a rigorous, unethically informed way and still be utterly and every time horrified by them.

Hilary Earl (56:41)
And I just want to add to that, Val. So in terms of our film, ⁓ Val and I have talked a lot about that very issue about how to use them visually in the film. And one of the things or well, the principal thing, I guess, ⁓ the principal ethical concern is to identify the people in the images. So the Germans didn't look at these and say these were the Epstein family and this was the Grinfield family and that was Sorella and

Valerie (57:06)
Mm-hmm.

Hilary Earl (57:11)
that was Ruben, they looked at them as objects. so they objectified them in their policy, they objectified them in their actions, and they objectified them in their photography. And then they objectified them later when they pulled them out and looked at them and did whatever they did with them. But in the film, really what I want to do is tell people who these people are, who the people of Leopoldia were, who Sorella Epstein was, how we came to discover who they were.

That is a form of ethical investigation that I think is really important. So it gives subjectivity back to people who were robbed of it ⁓ in their lifetime. And I think that's really, really important.

Waitman Beorn (57:55)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's true. mean, it sort of says these are people. These are not just, you know, part of the the two two thousand or so people that we killed this day. Like these are actually people with families and.

Hilary Earl (58:06)
know, says that really beautifully. Yeah.

Val says that really beautifully, you know. I mean, we all say it, I guess, when you're looking at those images of corpses and numbers, but, you know, one individual, like, it can tell a lot, and it can help us understand something bigger, I think.

Waitman Beorn (58:26)
Well,

and this is something that's interesting because I often say that the Holocaust isn't six million people killed by the Nazis. It's one person killed six million times because it's always an individual experience that is always somewhat unique and somewhat different, but that is an individual human being with a father and a mother and, you know, et cetera, et Right. And so, I mean, I think that's one of the things that's interesting. And, know, in teaching, and this is to sort of get back to

Valerie (58:42)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (58:55)
to your documentary, I think we talked a little about this film, which is, as I understand it, I think is the only film, moving film footage that we have of one of the, least that is X-NAT. I mean, there may have been others, but it's the only one that we have. And it really does encompass so much. You know, when you show this to students, I use it in teaching it, you know, all the time because it's...

It's at once horrifying and at once incredibly mundane. I always think about the little dog, this little dog that's like running around, a little Jack Russell terrier or something that's like, and when they shoot, the dog like runs around in a circle because there's loud noise, you know, and that's such a ordinary thing that sort of offsets, offsets the entire, the entire video. Can you talk a little about, guess, what, what you're trying to do with documentary and how does that film footage

fit in with that because it's sort of like, feel like we talked a bit of conversation about this at lessons of legacies, but I don't remember all the details, but that this film actually, in a way that these photographs kind of did for the book, the film kind of forms the centerpiece of the documentary.

Hilary Earl (1:00:06)
Yeah, so the film is called, first of all, for people who can look forward to seeing it, it's called Shkeda, Murder on the Beach. And it's a feature length documentary, so it's a full length, ⁓ probably is gonna have an educational cut. ⁓ And it's really the story of, it's the story of the photographs, and it's the story of the destruction of Leopoldia and the community of Leopoldia. And so it's told through the...

the daughter of David Zivkon, who was the rescuer of the photograph. She's still alive and she lives in Leopoldia. Valerie and I went and met her and interviewed her last summer. It's told through two survivors of the executions, Edward Anders and George Schwab. Both were children in 1941, in December of 1941, and both, each of them have miraculous rescue stories, survival stories.

⁓ And it's told through ⁓ Edward's, ⁓ Edward Anders' son, who talks about Edward who, ⁓ we really wouldn't know the whole story of Leopold as soon as we do without Edward Anders, because after he retired, he was a professor, he made his way to the United States after the war, and ⁓ he was a world-class chemist. ⁓ And ⁓ he made it his, like, life's work.

to discover the name of every last person in Leopold who was murdered. And so he created this database of victims. And ⁓ it's also ⁓ told through witnesses like Valerie, who's worked intimately with these photographs and Edward Westerman who knows the SD and SS and the military side of things quite well. ⁓

⁓ And it's also told through the photographs themselves and that 92nd piece of footage by Reinhard Wiener, ⁓ which I suppose were witnesses of those actions, right? So ⁓ it's the story of those photos and it's the story of what happened to the town and everyone in the town and how we know about it today. So the footage itself, yeah, you asked me about the footage, sorry, go

And this part.

Waitman Beorn (1:02:28)
No, no, that's fine. mean, I

Valerie (1:02:29)
you

Waitman Beorn (1:02:30)
think that that's a great introduction. I mean, the question that immediately springs to mind, you know, I guess one Holocaust historian to another is how does working with these photographs, particularly for Valerie, right, because you've done this as a career almost, you know, how does that affect you as a researcher? Does it affect you differently than working in documents or?

you know, testimonies.

Valerie (1:02:59)
I think, and yeah, I've sort of wondered about this, like why was eight-year-old me, nine-year-old so affected by photographs, right? And that's still there. There's still this like gravitational pull that I feel towards photographs and they sit with me differently than ⁓ other kinds of sources that I've worked with. I mean, I think off the top of our heads we could name all kinds of, know, testimonies or document, you know, written state.

generated documents that also, you know, with incredible power, describe aspects of this history that ⁓ change us. ⁓ But the photographs to me, is the power of individualizing these people, of restoring personhood to these people. I think a single photograph, like Zarela's image, ⁓ this is, you know,

probably the best known photograph of the series of 12. It's four women and a little girl lined up to pose for the photographer.

that can articulate the experience to the degree that any outsider coming into the history can ⁓ imagine. And better articulates the scale of the loss that the Holocaust represents. Again, I think getting away from statistics, getting away from just numbers, even though the numbers are horrifying.

⁓ When we, because we see ourselves in these images. ⁓ That same photograph that I've described, ⁓ one of the women ⁓ captured in that group of five, her name was Fumma Purva. And as, know, in the course of researching this Gator Beach photographs, I was just going through big broad searches of the Yad Vashem photographic archival holdings. And I stumbled on.

a pre-war photograph of Fruma Purva with her daughter. And she's fully dressed. in, it looks like a backyard somewhere. The daughter's laying in a hammock and she's balanced sort of on one side of it.

It was like a gut punch because the face was unmistakable. knew it the instant I saw it, I knew who I was looking at because only a few years later, there she is again, the center of this, another portrait of five, you know, four women and a girl from that same place. the first photograph is, it's like the kind of family photographs we all have in old albums on, you know, the walls of our home and.

There's an intimacy to them, right? There's a connectedness we feel to those photographs. It's the story of ourselves. It's the story of our own history when we look at those images. And then that same medium is then used to document. ⁓

I don't know, think for all of us as Holocaust historians, the words are petering out right now, like ⁓ trying to articulate the enormity of this event, the significance of this event, the loss that this event represents. ⁓ I think we all get tripped up, right? And I have this other sort

project I've kind of been working on on the side is as photographs as are a kind of language under themselves or their own species of rhetoric. That's a phrase that I'm borrowing from Susie Linfield, that photographs operate for us in a way that language can because they can articulate things that words are not capable of capturing. And so I think for me, that as a researcher,

photographs have been a thing that I gravitate to, to say the thing that I can't with words, right? And they give me something that is without the abstraction that language is, right? Every word we say is some, you know, basically abstract, know, we've all agreed, you know, tree is the thing that grows in our yard with the trunk and the, right? Like language is abstraction, but the information we obtained from a photograph just enters, you know, through our eyes, into our brain. And there's this connection and recognition and

understanding that comes from that, is so raw and visceral. And I think, you know, making that part of whatever, you know, aspect of this history that we're trying to understand and, and explain. ⁓

connects us at a deeper level to it.

Waitman Beorn (1:07:51)
I think, mean, one of things that I was thinking about, because I pulled up the photographs to look at while we were talking. And I just pulled them up on whatever Google images to get them up. two things sort of sprung to mind. But one of them is that when we look at that one photograph, the one of the five, and the little girl is clearly, she has like a bottle or something on her head and she's ducking behind the others because she doesn't want to be photographed.

That is a moment that is instantly a human moment. It's a moment that we've seen in our own kids, if they're being shy and want to be photographed or other people's kids. ⁓ And one of the differences, because I was thinking about this question as you were as you were answering as well, there's something about a photograph that encompasses whatever happens to be in the frame of the shot ⁓ in a way that when you

When you were writing something, whether you're a survivor, writing your experiences down, ⁓ you have to intentionally add every detail, right? Cause you're, creating it when you're writing it. So if you were describing, if you were at that scene and describing what was happening to you at that moment, for us to know that the little girl was hiding her face, you would have actually had to write that down intentionally and say like, and then I saw her. Whereas in this moment, it captures everything that's there.

⁓ and I don't know if that makes sense, but it's, it's, it's, it's a level of, doesn't require the same level of intentionality in witnessing that, that a memoir does, or even an oral history where you have to say the thing, you have to describe the thing, but the photograph, and again, this isn't harkening back to the photograph is showing reality. ⁓ but it is showing everything that is scientifically, you know, empirically within the frame of the focal point.

of the lens and that gives us, it gives us all we can have to work with of that particular shot. And then we can find, you we can look at things within it and sort of find new things to, to, to tell us about the event while at the same time recognizing, you know, these images are

simultaneously. there's a there's a there's a great section in the in the book on sort of how this fits into the larger genre of beach photography in general, which is really a fascinating way of thinking about this, you know, that on the one hand, this is an age old trope of people at the beach having their picture taken. But of course, it's like everything else for the Nazis. It's this twisted perversion of that of that thing. I know. I sound like I'm rambling, but I mean, there's something about the.

the totality of the frame. And of course, when we're looking at photographs, we also have realized that the photograph itself is cropping reality because we're only seeing what the photographer has put within the aperture. I don't know if that makes any sense at all if I was just sort of going off the top. Yeah.

Hilary Earl (1:10:53)
Can I just speak to that?

I think it highlights something that's transformed in the history profession. So over the last 20 years, maybe, historians were never allowed to feel. We weren't allowed to have emotion. You were discouraged from feeling anything. You were seen as somehow weak, or it was gendered. Only women worked on weak subjects where you had emotion. And I think that the visual turn has allowed us to be empathetic.

in ways that the discipline didn't allow us to be in the past. And I think about my own trajectory as a historian. I started off working in Jewish history on victims and I would have horrible nightmares at night, ⁓ feeling the pain of people and I couldn't stand it. And so when I did my masters, I switched from victims to perpetrators and I had this, know, wish of relief.

I didn't have to empathize with these people. Well, then I found out I did actually had to figure out what was going on to understand, sympathize with them, not empathize with them. But certainly by looking at the photograph, you can, you're allowed to. And if you don't feel something and if you can't visualize yourself or imagine yourself in that situation where your child is hiding from the camera, that's unusual, I think.

Waitman Beorn (1:11:51)
You have to sympathize with them. Yeah.

Valerie (1:11:57)
it.

Hilary Earl (1:12:11)
⁓ And I think that is a shift in our profession and the way that we are allowed to ⁓ think about the past in different ways. I think that's an important shift.

Waitman Beorn (1:12:22)
Well, I think that's part of the reason that asked the question because, you know, oftentimes, ⁓ you know, we hear, you know, that as a father, you know, I see this in a certain way. And again, I'm not. And I say this every time I bring this up. I'm not suggesting that one has to have children or be a parent to empathize and realize these are horrible situations. Right. That's not that's not what I'm saying. ⁓ But I have noticed personally.

my experience with doing the work of studying the Holocaust is different after having become a parent. I like I was reading, for example, ⁓ there's this book called Promise Me You'll Kill Yourself, ⁓ and it's about the sort of mass flood of suicides in Germany towards the of the war ⁓ amongst normal individual people. It's a fantastic book. ⁓ think it's Florian ⁓ Huber, think, is the author. ⁓

But I read a part where a woman jumped into a river with her like six year old daughter, intending to drown them both. And then ⁓ she, her will to live or whatever overcame her and she swam to the surface and her daughter didn't. And I was like, yep, that's it. can't, I can't, I'm done. I can't read anymore of this book. And I put it on the shelf. And again, it's not, it's a fantastic book. It's incredibly well researched. And you know, I've discovered that I've had to take

Valerie (1:13:38)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (1:13:48)
breaks when I come to certain things that happen to be about children. Because I put myself in that situation. But I think, Hilary, what you're saying is actually very true that maybe 20, 30 years ago, people would sort of be thinking, you're kind of being melodramatic or overly sensitive or something. Yeah.

Hilary Earl (1:14:04)
not historical. It's not historical to have emotion, right? That's

somehow too feminine or too, you know, history was a man's profession. I'm a bit older than you, but when I went up through the PhD ranks or master's student, it was still largely dominated by male scholars and ⁓ those kinds of questions weren't considered or considered relevant, I think.

Waitman Beorn (1:14:32)
I

think as soon as you bring up that gendered piece, and I think it's really important because I also think we can see some of that in the way that photographs were used in the past in sort of the old great white man view of history where like, you know, the photograph is the photograph. You know, it is a depiction of reality in a rational and real world. ⁓ that they might code, wrongly, of course, they might code thinking about the gaze or like what the

what the photographer was trying to accomplish, or if it's gendered in the sense of like what they're photographing is kind of a wishy washy like postmodern kind of approach. But actually, that's the better way of doing it. You know, it's kind of like the Ronkian history, right? Versus versus a more multi multi multi perspective kind of view. If that makes sense. I didn't mean to bring Ronk into it, but you know, Yeah, well.

Hilary Earl (1:15:25)
This is really a history podcast, isn't it?

Waitman Beorn (1:15:27)
For our listeners, ⁓ quickly, Leopold Ranca was one of the really important people in the history of history. But he kind of believed that the facts were the facts and that history could be this very sort of rational and explicative discipline that didn't really have a lot of, ⁓ I guess, suppose, nuance or different perspectives in understanding the past. I'm probably butchering that as well, but that's kind of a cliff notes for Ranca.

Valerie (1:15:31)
you

Waitman Beorn (1:15:56)
Sorry, I got a little nerdy there for a second.

⁓ Well, mean, gosh, we've covered quite a lot and I really appreciate the time. ⁓ Maybe we can close with, ⁓ well, before we get to that, I will say for our listeners, I will put a link on the show notes, probably to the Holocaust Museum's ⁓ Schgede photographs, ⁓ so that you can at least look at them and maybe to the Leopold video as well.

Valerie (1:16:28)
They're

Waitman Beorn (1:16:29)
I don't know if there's a way to do it.

Valerie (1:16:29)
there. You can't you can't see them to the USHMM. They're beautiful. They're visible when you're inside the network. But if you can, if you search ⁓ actually the best search is Karl Straat to the Yad Vashem archives. They turn them up. Yeah, they turn them up.

Waitman Beorn (1:16:33)
Okay.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'll put a link there so that you can,

because I know we've talked a lot about images ⁓ and it's kind of ironic that we're talking about images, but you can't look at them, you know, so at the same time. ⁓ we're kind of teasing you there, I guess, but I'll put that in there. ⁓ But before we close, I always ask, ⁓ what is one book on the Holocaust that you sort of have found particularly meaningful or are finding particularly meaningful? And again, as I always say, this is purely the day.

Valerie (1:16:55)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (1:17:13)
So you're not being held to this tomorrow, but for today, what books would you recommend?

Hilary Earl (1:17:19)
So for me, because I'm reading almost exclusively in the realm of photography, Latvia, the Holocaust in the Baltics, ⁓ I read Linda Kinsler's Come to this Court and Cry, and it was an absolute page-turner. ⁓ It's a mystery, ⁓ it's a historical ⁓ story, and it's a family story about her.

trying to discover who her grandfather was and what she discovers is absolutely horrifying to her. And she's a beautiful writer. She's a rhetorician by training and she's a beautiful writer. Paige Turner, come to this court and cry. Linda Kinsler.

Waitman Beorn (1:18:01)
Absolutely. We'll second that.

Valerie (1:18:05)
I am not ⁓ breaking any molds when I say anything by Primo Levi. I encountered him as an undergrad and I have found him to be a touchstone for absolutely everything that I have researched and taught in the years since then. ⁓ When I open my Holocaust ⁓ course, have students read Shema, his book.

home, the one he wrote right, you know, right after having been liberated from Auschwitz. And the line that I highlight from it is consider that this has been. And what resonates with me about that line is he is asking us to think without judgment, right? And I think particularly I've returned to that line in my work on photography because he's simply asking us to be open to it. And so for us,

you know, in our very comfortable, you know, late 20th, early 20th, 21st century positions to decide, you know, we'll look at this and not that and, ⁓ you know, get ourselves in knots over what's proper and what's not. I think he is asking us to cast a far wider net and simply to accept the complexity, the grayness, the...

know, confounding, ⁓ blurring of categories that we see the closer and the more honestly we study this history.

Waitman Beorn (1:19:35)
Well, those are both fantastic recommendations. And ⁓ thank you so much for coming on and for our listeners. Once again, thank you for listening. ⁓ Again, if you're finding this to be interesting, engaging, please leave us a rating or comment on all of the various places that you can find us. ⁓ And Hillary and Valerie, again, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk about it.

Hilary Earl (1:20:00)
Thanks, Whiteman.

Valerie (1:20:01)
My

pleasure. Thank you so much.