Exhibit Recalls the Holocaust
It was the spring of 1934. The new Fuhrer had come to address the residents of Hamburg, Germany. Armed with only a press pass and instructions to take Adolf Hitler’s photo for the daily Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 17-year-old Alfred Benjamin gripped the Leica his father had given him for his bar mitzvah and stood mere feet from where the man he considered a harmless idiot would speak.
The Fuhrer marched toward the platform, his skin pastier than Benjamin had imagined. Before Hitler spoke, Benjamin snapped his first photo, getting only the back of Hitler’s head. He would take no more: As Hitler began speaking, he stared directly at Benjamin, and the boy froze because “I suddenly realized that . . . he wanted to kill Jews.”
As the Nazis tightened the circle around the Jews of Germany, the boy kept taking pictures with his camera. They languished for half a century until the 81-year-old Benjamin fashioned them into a remembrance of the Holocaust.
The collection of photos, headlines and news stories opened last week in Santa Monica College’s Technology Building and will be on display through Oct. 17.
Benjamin, a retired hospital photographer, calls it “my way of putting together names and faces, bringing it all a step closer to rest.”
He is an unlikely witness to history.
When he was 10, Benjamin and three brothers were given box cameras, the kind many people placed on a stepladder and held still for seconds, praying that a serviceable image would materialize. Instead of shooting the usual stilted portraits, Benjamin aimed his camera at the streets, capturing the political turmoil of late-1920s Germany that would spawn the Nazis.
One day, years later, he took some photos of Nazi soldiers marching in front of his house. “I was naive. I had no fear. I couldn’t visualize what would soon come,” he said.
Today, three copies of that photograph, displayed so that the soldiers seem to be coming from all sides, is one of the dominant images of the memorial.
He was 16 in April 1933, when SS soldiers broke the windows of Jewish-owned stores in Hamburg while preventing anyone from entering to shop. Around the same time, he remembers, “the Nazis told Jewish children to stay home if they went to a non-Jewish school.”
The boy’s best friend, Heinrich Wentig, stopped talking to him. “We used to watch girls together. Then one day, I looked at him, and he just shook his head and shrugged. I [later] found out he had been ordered by his parents not to talk to me.”
And so Benjamin increasingly retreated behind his camera, taking photos of the bearded, charismatic Rabbi Joseph Carlebach, who had twice been invited to leave Germany--once for England, and once for Palestine. “But he was the chief negotiator with the Nazis for the Orthodox Jews. So, he said no, he would stay with his people,” Benjamin said.
The rabbi, whose outstretched arms dominate one montage, would later be murdered in a concentration camp.
Benjamin was about 18 when he came across demolition workers tearing apart a synagogue, brick by brick. He started taking photos and a nearby Gestapo agent saw him.
Oblivious to the danger, Benjamin took the film to be developed. When he came back later that day, the developer told him the film had come out blank.
The next morning, the police knocked on Benjamin’s door and demanded his photos. When he turned over the blanks, they hauled him to Gestapo headquarters, where he was beaten and ordered to leave the country in 24 hours.
He left in 16 hours--with his camera. In London, he met his future wife, Selma. Today, Selma laughs at how the photographer, in his trench coat, looked like a gangster.
His London photos are also part of the memorial.
He and his wife lived in London through the end of the war, then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked principally as chief photographer at Orthopaedic Hospital.
He retired 10 years ago. With time on his hands, the Holocaust memories came back to haunt him and he began working on the collection.
“Taking a photograph is touching life,” he said.
But he was never to find his first, imperfect photograph of Hitler.