Rudolf Werner Breslauer (1903 – 1945) has become known as the man who made the Westerbork film, featuring the iconic image of Settela Steinbach, the girl between the wagon doors of a departing train. Not many people know that he was a gifted photographer. Colleague Sake Elzinga from Assen wants to make that more known.
There is no photograph showing Rudolf Werner Breslauer with a photo camera from the period when he and his family were in Camp Westerbork, only one of him with a video camera on a tripod. With what did he take all those thousands of photos in and around the camp, photographer Sake Elzinga wondered. The 63-year-old Assenaar stands up and takes two cameras from a shelf in his large kitchen. “I found out through the grapevine that it must have been a Leica, this type of camera. I bought this one, one from 1939 and one from 1941. Typically German. The best 35mm cameras ever made.”
In the exchange exhibition The Memory of Camp Westerbork , of which Elzinga has been guest curator since Friday through May 7, the cameras can be seen. Since the opening of the Memorial Center forty years ago, the Assenaar has been a regular in Hooghalen and has recorded many events and gatherings. “But when people call me ‘the photographer from Westerbork’, I say: ‘No, there was only one: Rudolf Werner Breslauer; a Jewish photographer from Leipzig, who fled to the Netherlands during the war and eventually ended up in Camp Westerbork’. I want to tell his story. He’s done so much in the two and a half years he’s been there.”
Treacherous innocence
Around 2010, former director Dirk Mulder points Elzinga to a kind of portfolio folder by Breslauer for camp commander Albert Gemmeker. It marks the beginning of a search for the life and work of the photographer from Leipzig, who was commissioned by Gemmeker to make photographs and also the Westerbork film. What is particularly striking is that Breslauer not only photographed in the camp, he was also allowed to go outside.
Elzinga shows pictures of farmers working on the land, of a nest with eggs, bushes, sheep, and a dog. “When I got my hands on the folder, I was blown away by the images. There is a kind of treacherous innocence. Lambs and eggs, you wonder, Westerbork was much worse, wasn’t it? Yes, that’s just it. He was caught, he was deported and died. He was in Westerbork and had to do things, but luckily he was also allowed to do things. For example, from the camp site. He has even been to Assen. There was, of course, good collateral in the camp; his family. So he did come back.”
“Look, here you see De Kolk.” Elzinga puts a black and white photo on the table with the Vaart with a ship on it and the Asser theater in the background. He puts a similar photo next to it. Again the canal, a ship and the theatre. “The same photo, but in 2022.”
Elzinga took his newly purchased old Leicas in Assen to the places where Breslauer had been photographing during the war. “I tried to get under his skin, to see how he walked here. And I can’t get into his thoughts, I’m not Jewish, but I can see the sadness behind it, that he had a kind of fictional freedom with this camera. He could do things, but he was actually a prisoner. Breslauer only lived to be 41 years old. He is best known for the Westerbork film, but he was a photographer; I want to give him that fame. I come across beautiful photos. He may not have been a creative photographer, but technically his photos are very good.”
Frau Antje
Elzinga takes a photo with several houses on the Prins Hendrikstraat in Assen. “Camp commander Albert Gemmeker lived here for three months, from October 1942 to January 1943, because his house near the camp was not yet finished,” he points out. He puts his own photo next to it; the differences are mainly in the modern cars and a new building, which was not there during the war.
He also printed the new photos in black and white and edited the edges with the same type of serrated knife as was used in the 1940s. “The old and the new photos are given a place in the exhibition, so that visitors start thinking: wait a minute; is this now? You have to look closely.”
To Elzinga’s surprise, Breslauer has gone all the way through his client Gemmeker’s house. “He has photographed every room, every detail; it’s almost scary. Look, here’s the bedroom. On the bed is a doll of the Dutch-German advertising figure Frau Antje, bizarre isn’t it? At first I thought this was in the commander’s house, but the photos were taken in the house in Assen.”
“It shocked me, the photos that show Gemmeker with his mistress frau Hassel are completely staged. For example, they read a book by the fireplace, full under the photo lamps that Breslauer used. It looks like a movie scene. Technically good photos, by the way, but there must have been contact between him and Gemmeker, who loved photography and wanted scrapbooks of everything. If you capture everything in such detail as a photographer, you have a certain contact.”
One of the things Breslauer also had to do was take passport photos of the people in the camp. “Once he had to take 1300 photos in a day, he wrote to his mother. Which then develop and print; that’s a mega job! I myself had to photograph soldiers going to Lebanon in 1978; six passport photos in civilian clothes and six in uniform, so I know what that production is like and how it feels.”
Elzinga once worked at Foto Arti in the center of Assen. In his search for information about Breslauer, he comes across purchase receipts from Camp Westerbork in the Drents Archive and discovers where the photographer bought his materials: “At the same Photo Arti; isn’t that special?”
Without filter
Much is still unknown about the photographer from Leipzig, who did not survive the war. “Actually, my quest is still in its early stages. That brings about such an exhibition. I think it’s a stepping stone to learning more about Breslauer. It’s actually just starting now. I could make a book later. Every time I come across more images; photos that the insiders may know, but a lot of other people don’t.”
Despite his special position in the camp, Breslauer cannot escape deportation. On September 4, 1944, before he gets on the train, he asks if an acquaintance can take his camera for him. He wants to take that. Gemmeker forbids it. “Actually it was the filter between him and the world and that was not allowed.”
Exhibition
Sake Elzinga is one of the guest curators of the changing exhibition The Memory of Camp Westerbork , which opened last July. His exhibition about the photographer from Westerbork, a long-cherished wish of his, opened Friday afternoon and can be seen until 7 May.
There is also work on display that the Asser ‘in-house photographer’ of the Memorial Center itself made over the past forty years during commemorations and other gatherings on and around the former camp site.
The ‘carrying photo’ of the exhibition shows a train near Hooghalen. Elzinga: ,,I made this on September 4, 2022, exactly 78 years after the deportation of Breslauer on the same route. I got down on my knees and suddenly saw the upright sleepers along the track. I had never noticed those before. They stand there like some kind of guards or waving people, while the train passes by. A symbolic image.”
It’s quiet in the kitchen in Assen for a while. Then Elzinga tells how he recently climbed into the wagon that is now on the former camp site with his camera and shows the photo, taken in the direction of the open door. A shadow of a human enters. The photo that Breslauer couldn’t take.