'I looked death in the eyes. I did it fifty thousand times...' Wilhelm Brasse _______________
When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939 he was asked to swear allegiance
to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp
as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer he was ordered by the SS to
record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of the
prisoners as they entered the camp went on to capture the criminal medical experiments of
Josef Mengele and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945 Brasse took around 50 000
photographs of the horror around him. He took them because he had no choice. Eventually
Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera. First he risked his life by
joining the camp's Resistance movement faking documents for prisoners trying to smuggle
images to the outside world to reveal what was happening. Then when Soviet troops finally
advanced on the camp to liberate it Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs.
'Because the world must know ' he said. For readers of The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Boy
Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz this extraordinary true story of horror hope and
courage lies at the very heart of the Holocaust. _______________ 'Brasse has left us with a
powerful legacy in images. Because of them we can see the victims of the Holocaust as human and
not statistics.' Fergal Keane
