Searching for his mother, photojournalist Eric Schwab exposed horrors of Nazi camps

AFP photographer Eric Schwab recorded the horrors of the Holocaust — the crematoria, the piles of skeletal bodies and emaciated faces — as he went from one Nazi extermination camp to the next in the spring of 1945 searching for his mother.

The former fashion photographer could have ended up there himself but escaped from a prisoner of war train bound for Germany and later joined the French Resistance.

Schwab, who was born in Hamburg to a French father and a German Jewish mother, was one of the first photographers to work for AFP after it was refounded in August 1944 as Paris was liberated.

He followed the Allied troops as they advanced into Germany as a war correspondent, becoming a witness to the horrors discovered as they entered the Nazi death camps.

For Schwab, it was also deeply personal, a quest to find his mother Elsbeth, who was deported in 1943. He had heard nothing of her since she was taken.

Witness

One of Schwab’s first published photographs is of the entrance gate to the Buchenwald camp, bearing the terrible inscription “Jedem das Seine” (“To each what he deserves”).

A few days earlier, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler had given the order to liquidate the camp. The braziers were still smoking, and the bodies of prisoners executed by a bullet to the head were strewn across the camp.

At the Dachau camp near Munich, he took a series of haunting portraits of survivors that laid bare the inhumanity they suffered, including the number tattooed on the bone-thin arm of a Jewish prisoner.

Another shot showed a man in a striped prison garb talking through barbed wire to a woman held in the camp’s brothel.

He also captured moments of hope, as with a group of French prisoners listening to the Marseillaise national anthem. Or another of Polish, German and French priests celebrating mass for the camp’s dead in the chapel.

Schwab’s journey then took him to the camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt), in what is today the Czech Republic. A few days from the end of the war, the region was in chaos as vast numbers of people fled advancing Soviet troops towards US-controlled territory.

Reunited

But it was there that Schwab’s dream came true. In May 1945, he discovered a frail woman with white hair wearing a nurse’s cap: his mother.

Then aged 56, Elsbeth had managed to escape death and was looking after child survivors at the camp. It was a hugely emotional reunion but it appeared that he did not photograph his mother — or at least did not publish the images.

After the war, Schwab and his mother left France and settled in New York in 1946.

Schwab’s work did not earn him the renown of some of the other photographers.

As often happens with news agency photos, his images were printed in the media but not attributed to him by name.

It would take years for his talent to be fully recognized, particularly the powerful portraiture and composition found throughout his now iconic works.

Schwab died in 1977 aged 67.