NONFICTION - May 28, 1995

IN THE CAMPS by Erich Hartmann (Norton: $35; 110 pp.) It’s been 57 years since Magnum photographer Erich Hartmann and his family fled Nazi Germany for America, but the inferno of hatred that consumed Europe in his wake has haunted him throughout his life. Now 73, he returned there to honor the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s death camps with a series of black-and-white photographs documenting what remains of them. It’s hard to imagine an image related to the Holocaust that doesn’t resonate with power; arguably the event of the 20th Century, it was an all-time low for the human race, which is still struggling to come to terms with it, and Hartmann’s photographs are powerful indeed.

Twenty-two concentration camps built by the Nazis are still standing in various states of decay, and most are slated to be transformed into memorials or museums. Hartmann wanted to capture the camps before they undergo this sanitation process--a fact that lends added significance to these moving pictures. The reality of the Holocaust must remain neither neutralized or forgotten; the reality is here in Hartmann’s austere pictures of gas chambers disguised as shower stalls, shabby rooms where medical experiments were performed, storage units crammed with the suitcases and knapsacks belonging to doomed travelers. May we continue to honor their stolen lives, as Hartmann does here.