Never Forget Her Face

Czesława Kwoka in 1943 at Auschwitz. She is 14 and terrified as she looks at the camera.  She was born in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in Poland.  Her mother was Katarzyna Kwoka, a Catholic.  Their crime? Being Poles, who were considered racially inferior. She died on 12 March 1943, her mother on 18 February 1943.

Wilhelm Brasse, a prisoner himself, took the picture.  He recalled her, saying  "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her."  A woman Kapo (prisoner overseer) beat her about the face with a stick. "This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing." 

"Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me. You could never say anything."

Although Polish Brasse was also part Austrian, but he refused to swear allegiance to Hitler after the Germans invaded his country.  He tried to escape to Hungary to join the Polish army in France but was captured.  As a former professional portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS camp administrators to record the faces of prisoners as well as other details of the camp. In 1945 American troops liberated him from another camp. He saved 40,000 to 50,000 photographs, which were used against the SS administrators during their war crimes trials.

(This and other prisoner photographs were rendered into color by Marina Amaral, a Brazilian artist.)