Ghostly Landscapes: Soviet Liberators Photograph the Holocaust

In the West, Auschwitz and its gas chambers became a metonym of genocide, but genocide takes place less often in purpose-built death centers than in mundane sites of daily existence, like “killing fields” in Cambodia or by the sides of roads in Rwanda. So too with the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust was more mundane, integrated into daily life under Nazi occupation. Because of this, the absence documented in Soviet Holocaust liberation photography better reflects the experience of genocide than the human drama of survival captured in American and British photography. In these mundane, haunting, and sublime images, Soviet photographers have unwittingly captured the story of genocide—ghostly landscapes haunted by the dead, not the living.