March 16, 2008

AUSCHWITZ ALBUM

I heartily recommend Alec Wilkinson’s mesmerizing essay in this week’s New Yorker, “Picturing Auschwitz," on the power of a recently discovered photo album which, for the first time, shows the quotidian lives of Nazis who operated the killing machine at the Auschwitz death camp. Like the watershed Lodz Ghetto Album (showing "ghetto photographer" Henryk Ross’s previously unseen pictures of privileged Jews who were spared execution by agreeing to collaborate with their Nazi-aligned superiors), the Auschwitz photo trove constitutes the only known visual evidence of the perpetrators’ everyday existence.

Had the Auschwitz photographs not been taken, stowed away, retrieved, and explained by archivists, these details would have surely been lost forever. And we would have had less direct knowledge of the banality of evil.

The New Yorker provides an expanded album of images on its Web site, including the above group shot of Auschwitz officers singing at a retreat in 1944, with Dr. Josef Mengele plainly visible in the front row, third from right, facing the accordianist. (Mengele, who conducted hideous mock-scientific experiments on twins and others, was called the camp’s Angel of Death because he would often stand at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s boxcar receiving ramp and decide which arriving prisoners would live and which would go immediately to the crematoria.)

PENTAGON TAPES

The Pentagon this week admitted that it had unearthed at least 50 videotapes of post-9/11 interrogations of prisoners at its facilities across the globe. While these are not the infamous C.I.A. torture tapes, destroyed by the agency against the advice of Justice Department lawyers, they do raise the intriguing notion that even more incriminating footage may be unearthed in the near future.

In my December 15 blog post, “Watergate vs. Waterboard,” I noted:

“My guess is that we haven’t seen the end of the torture tapes. Somewhere, in some safety deposit box or closet or attic, or deep in the recesses of a rogue hard drive, someone – an underling, a supervisor, or an agent (whether proud of his actions, enraged by the actions of a colleague, or hoping to cover his ass) - made a dupe that he’s been squirreling away for three or four years, a copy of which will inevitably find its way into Congressional hands (or wind its way up onto YouTube), making dupes of everyone involved.

“Patience, patience. In this age when data is forever-stored and passed along, like traces of DNA in a genome, it wouldn't surprise me if somehow someone somewhere will unload that damning cache. “

MISCELLANY...Renowned sports columnist George Vecsey, in today’s New York Times, writes about a snapshot of Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens and a fan – 24-year-old Kevin Williams, who had worked for Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center.

...And, finally, on a wholly unrelated and lighter note, please check out my blog post at VanityFair.com - about the Eliot Spitzer mess: "A Governor's Glossary."