Paris (AFP)

Emaciated faces, frightened looks, piles of corpses, the doors of a crematorium oven: in spring 1945, an AFP photographer documented the horror of the Nazi extermination camps.

Former fashion photographer, prisoner who escaped after the break-up of the French army and joined the Resistance, Eric Schwab is one of the first photographers working for AFP after the agency was refounded in August 1944.

A war correspondent, he followed the progress of the Allied troops, becoming a witness to the horrors discovered as the death camps in Germany were liberated.

With a haunting quest: to find his mother Elsbeth, a German Jew, whom he has not heard from since she was deported in 1943.

One of his first published photos represents the portal of the Buchenwald concentration camp, struck with a terrible inscription "Jedem das Seine" (To each what he deserves). A few days earlier, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to liquidate the camp. The braziers are still smoking and the site is dotted with emaciated prisoners shot in the head.

In Dachau, Schwab produces portraits that tell of the suffering of the deportees. A prisoner reaches out, showing the number engraved in his flesh. A man in a striped jacket speaks through a perforated palisade with a woman detained at the brothel of the camp.

Hope is also present, as on the faces of this group of French people attending the raising of the tricolor, raising the cross of Lorraine. Or those Polish, German and French priests, detained in the camp, who are celebrating mass in the chapel.

It was only at Theresienstadt (today Terezin, in the Czech Republic), in a region in chaos where the population fled before the advance of the Soviet troops to pass in zone controlled by the Americans, that Eric Schwab realizes the crazy dream he was chasing: in May 1945 he discovers a frail woman, with white hair, wearing a nurse's cap. It was his mother, then 56, who escaped death and cared for the surviving children. A reunion of such emotion that, out of modesty, he did not photograph them. Or, if he did, the photos were not published. He moved with her to New York after the war.

Visual testimonies on the concentration camp horror were widely disseminated in 1945. But Eric Schwab did not immediately know the notoriety of other photographers who documented the liberation of the camps: as often for an agency photographer, his photos were reproduced in the press, but not signed.

It will take several years for his talent to be recognized, in particular the quality of his framing, the strength of his portraits. His photos then become icons of a terrible period of humanity. A large part of them is in the archives of the National Library.

Eric Schwab died in 1977 at the age of 67.

© 2020 AFP