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Photos of the Šķēde massacre shed new light on the Holocaust in Latvia

When David Zivkon, a Jewish prisoner during World War II, discovered 12 photographs of the 1941 murder of Jews on Shkede Beach in Latvia, he recognized some of his neighbors. The photos showed them undressing in front of a shooting pit. Zivkon was working in the home of SS officer Karl Strott when he discovered the negatives of the photographs depicting the murder of the Jews of Liepaja , the Yad Vashem museum website reports. Zivkon secretly copied the negatives and returned the originals, and later, in 1945, handed the set of photographs over to Soviet investigators, The Times of Israel journalist Matt Leibowitz writes.

The site of the massacre in Shkede, Latvia. December 1941.

After the "Murder on the Beach" images were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, they became a visual symbol of the "Holocaust by Bullets": the German SS execution squads and their collaborators murdered 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Now historian Valerie Hebert has collected and published a volume of interdisciplinary essays, Frames of the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Execution in Latvia, 1941, which offers a holistic examination of these chilling images.

“I hope this book will help change the ambivalence among scholars about using, publishing, and teaching with photographs by working through the ethical issues they present and then demonstrating their richness for interpretation,” says Hebert. 

The site of the massacre in Shkede, Latvia. December 1941.

She said she conceived the idea for the book while giving a workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Shkede's photographs are recognizable to millions of people who have seen them in Holocaust museums or documentaries, but until now almost nothing has been written about the circumstances under which they were taken.

"Each chapter talks about one way or another of 'reading' these photographs," says Eber, a history professor at Lakehead University in Orillia, Canada, who previously published "Hitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg."

In his essay, “Not Tiptoeing in the Face of Suffering: Why We Look at Holocaust Photographs,” Eber writes: “Victims may look at the lens, but circumstances deny them consent … Moreover, photographs, in their permanence, perpetuate violence and degradation.”

The site of the massacre in Shkede, Latvia. December 1941.

Themes that Eber proposes to consider include "the ethical issues presented by the photographs, the ways in which the images resonate with literary and photographic imagery, and the vulnerability of the victim's identity when others write their signatures."

Although nearly every stage of the Holocaust is documented on film, leading historians have only recently begun to analyze the photographs using new approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI), which helps identify people in the Shkede photographs.

“The book tells not only the story of the Shkede Beach murder photographs, but also models a broader way of thinking about Holocaust photographs,” says Eber. “I hope the book will show readers that these photographs, despite their ugly history and unbearable content, should command our undivided attention.”

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