Peter Maria SchäferSpuren

Photographs of Auschwitz – Peter Maria Schäfer (*1961), photographer and film-maker, has already erected a cinematic monument to the Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Szymanski (1917–2002) with his journalistic work. Now he is devoting a book to him with a sequence of impressive photographs that he has taken since the mid-1980s in the former extermination camp of Auschwitz and in the town’s Judengasse. Tadeusz Szymanski, who fell seriously ill on his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1941 and had therefore already been selected, survived because the course of typhus was to be studied on him as a living “experimental object.” In 1945, during a transport to Buchenwald carried out shortly before the arrival of the Soviet army, he managed to escape at a stop on Czech territory. As early as 1946 Szymanski, together with other former prisoners, campaigned for the preservation of the camp complex at Auschwitz and for the establishment of a memorial there. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum he was concerned above all with looking after visitors in the 1950s, fought for the establishment of an international youth meeting centre and headed the collections of the camp museum until his retirement in 1977. Tadeusz Szymanski, who is regarded as a pioneer of Polish reconciliation with Germany, was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal in 1986.

Exhibition:
B12 Kulturzentrum August Everding, Bottrop, 21/1 – 19/3/2022