Usually named only as Alex, a Jewish prisoner from Greece, the photographer was a member of the Sonderkommando, inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers.
280 and 281 show the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, shot through the black frame of the gas chamber's doorway or window.
The Sonderkommando ("special unit") in Auschwitz were primarily made up of Jewish inmates, and at one point a few Soviet prisoners-of-war, who were forced to work in the crematoria.
[12] Afterwards the Sonderkommando moved the bodies out of the gas chamber, removed gold fillings, false teeth, hair, jewellery and spectacles, and disposed of the corpses, at first in mass graves, and later in furnaces and fire pits.
[16] Other members of the Sonderkommando in the camp's crematorium V—Alter Fajnzylberg (also known as Stanisław Jankowski), brothers Shlomo and Josel Dragon, and David Szmulewski [fr]—helped obtain and hide the camera, and acted as look-outs.
We all gathered at the western entrance leading from the outside to the gas-chamber of Crematorium V: we could not see any SS men in the watchtower overlooking the door from the barbed wire, nor near the place where the pictures were to be taken.
But according to director Christophe Cognet, the shorter shadows of the deportees in the birch woods, located to the south-east of the shooting, and the light of August indicate that photos 283 and 282 were taken between 10 am and 11.30 am.
The film was smuggled out of the camp by the Polish underground, hidden inside a tube of toothpaste by Helena Dantón, who worked in the SS canteen.
A note dated 4 September 1944 and signed "Stakło", written by political prisoners Józef Cyrankiewicz and Stanisław Kłodziński, was attached to the film.
[27] Some of the cropped images were published in 1945, attributed to the Sonderkommando member David Szmulewski, in a report on Auschwitz-Birkenau by Jan Sehn, a Polish judge.
[29] Struk writes that, in 1960, Władyslaw Pytlik of the resistance movement in Brzeszcze offered testimony about his wartime experiences to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and brought along three prints of the cropped photographs.
[27] Commentators have argued that the cropping offers a distorted view of events, giving the impression that the photographer was able to use his camera openly.
[30] The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman argues that the cropping makes the photographs appear safe and erases the act of resistance and the phenomenology of the images, the process that "made them an event": The mass of black that surrounds the sight of the cadavers and the pits, this mass where nothing is visible gives in reality a visual mark that is just as valuable as all the rest of the exposed surface.
That mass where nothing is visible is the space of the gas chamber: the dark room into which one had to retreat, to step back, in order to give light to the work of the Sonderkommando outside, above the pyres.