Wilhelm Brasse

Product Description

Book & DVD. This is a unique eye-witness documentary record of life inside Auschwitz at its full operational peak as recalled with impressive lucidity & matter-of-factness by Wilhelm Brasse prisoner no. 3444 who due to his professional skills escaped extermination by becoming a photographer whom the ever-well-organised Nazis obliged to record photographically the running of the camp including such detail as Dr Mengeles infamous experiments. Wilhelm Brasse was born in 1917 in Zywiec of an Austrian father & a Polish mother. Before the war Brasse worked in a photographic studio in Katowice. For refusal to join the Wehrmacht he was sent to Auschwitz where from 1941 to 1945 he worked in the Identity Service as a photographer. He took tens of thousands of photographs of prisoners hundreds of portraits of SS-men & documented some so-called medical experiments. After the war ended he returned to Zywiec where he has been living ever since. In March 2010 Maria Anna Potocka conducted an interview with Wilhelm Brasse. The outcome is this book & its edited tales of the prisoner-cum-chief-photographer of Auschwitz together with a film with extracts from the interview. There is an introduction by the historian Teresa Wontor-Cichy the academic editor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The book is generously illustrated with photographs from Wilhelm Brasses own archives as well as the photographic archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum & Yad Vashem. The book is published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow Pol&. The publication has been supported by the following ministries & organizations: The Ministry of Culture & National Heritage of the Republic of Pol&.