Never Forgotten

Books on the Holocaust – the death of 6 million Jews during World War II – are reminders of the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany and of man’s inhumanity to man.

With the publication of Karl Koenig’s “Fragments,” his photographs give architecture a special place and a special voice in the expression of the banality of the evil of Naziism.

What heightens the drama and depth of the photographs is Koenig’s gumoil printing technique. In notes published at the back of the book, Koenig says he believed the process was well-suited for interpreting the concentration camps.

	“Fragments: Architecture of the Holocaust, An Artist’s Journey Through the Camps” by Karl P. Koenig, foreword by Ruth Franklin Fresco Fine Art Publications, $75, 64 pp.

Koenig was an Albuquerque resident – he died earlier this year – who visited the sites of 10 camps between 1994 and 2004. The first visit Koenig and his wife, Frances Salman Koenig, made was to Mauthausen, in Austria.

“The experience was overwhelming,” Koenig wrote in an essay in the book. “The impact was immediate, personal and powerful. My understanding of the Holocaust passed from a conceptual one to a tangible reality. Although my wife’s family, Russian and Jewish on her father’s side, had lost several members to the Final Solution, the tragedy only became a literal fact as we saw, smelled and felt the wood, stone and iron of the camp itself.”

Mauthausen appeared to be a medieval fortress, but was in fact constructed in the late 1930s by slave labor, wrote Koenig, who was not Jewish.

Among the images in the book are of group latrines for male inmates at Dachau, concrete stanchions holding barbed wire and insulators at Buchenwald, flattened shoes confiscated from inmates at Majdanek, cog wheels that pulled wagons stacked with bodies of people who had been “scientifically” killed and dissected at Sachsenhausen.

Salman Koenig said for her the image that was the most powerful was the one of a railroad trestle crossing a moat leading to the ancient military fortress in Breendonck, Belgium. Converted to a holding camp, it was also used to execute prisoners. “It was physically as dramatic as any we were in,” she said. “Across from the camp was a pig farm, so starving prisoners saw the pigs being fed. Such hideous irony. So probably it was the most grotesque of any camp (they visited).”

The book received a 2012 Bronze Medal given by Independent Publisher Book Awards and will be included in the 2012 Best Books edition of THE magazine. Fresco Fine Art Publications is in Albuquerque.

Frances Salman Koenig discusses “Fragments” at 6 p.m. Oct. 11 at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo, Santa Fe.