Malibu Photographer’s Exhibit Illuminates Aspects of the Holocaust

• UCLA Surgeon Brings Unique Perspective to the Horrors of World War II

BY ROBBY MAZZA

Since the end of World War II, there have been public denials of the Holocaust. With this resurgence of denials by such notables as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, controversial American David Duke and the late chess champion Bobby Fischer, Malibu resident Richard Ehrlich's latest photography work, “The Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen,” is an answer to the Holocaust deniers.
In his portfolio, which will be on exhibit at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica from Aug. 26-30, are photographs of Schindler’s list as well as records of horrific atrocities that occurred in the Nazi concentration camps.
While traveling in 2004, Ehrlich said he read about the International Tracing Service, located in Bad Arolsen, Germany and its archives of over 50 million Nazi documents involving more than 17 million people. He knew he had to see and perhaps photograph it.
After several futile attempts to gain access to the low-profile organization, he contacted someone in the State Department who got him access immediately. What he discovered during two trips in 2007 was something that he characterizes as life changing.
“I went over on the strength of not knowing what I was going to find,” he said. “I knew it would be interesting, but I didn’t know if it would be worthy of a photographic project, and it turned out to be great.”
Not only did the ITS give him access to everything in their archives, which are housed in several buildings, they also provided him with a guide who pointed out some of the more interesting documents.
Ehrlich took over 1000 pictures, and culled them down to a 54-photo exhibit, which was first shown at the American Jewish Committee’s annual meeting in New York, in May where it was viewed by more than 1000 people.
The committee chose 28 of the photos for its portfolio and accompanied each picture with a detailed caption. This exhibit, and possibly more of Ehrlich’s ITS pictures, will be on display next week at the gallery. It is in seven museums around the world, including the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the Musee d’Art in Paris and the Special Collections at the UCLA Young Research Library.
The exhibit shows the horrors of the concentration camps, as well as the obsessive record keeping of the Nazis. “Overall, the funny thing is [the Nazis] were meticulous in their record-keeping—even though what they were doing was just so horrible-they wrote everything down,” Ehrlich says.
Examples of this are his photographs from ledger books with records of the number of lice removed from each prisoner as they arrived at the camps. Perhaps one of the most jarring is yet another record from Hitler’s birthday celebration documenting the execution of one person every two minutes for an hour, which was ordered by Himmler.
“What’s in [the ITS archives] is what’s left,” says Ehrlich. “At the end of the war things happened very quickly and they tried to destroy the records, but they couldn’t, there was too much. Even with all the destruction, there were still 50 million pieces of paper left.”
Ehrlich says that this exhibit is especially important because the ITS is in the process of digitalizing its archives, making them more accessible to people. “It’s been interesting, because although this place is not a secret, they’ve kept it inaccessible for the most part since 1951—even relatives of Holocaust victims had a difficult time getting any documentation, and I don’t really know why,” he says. “I think it has to do with money—reparations—because even though the International Red Cross runs it, it’s paid for by the German government.”
This was not Ehrlich’s first glimpse into the concentration camps. In 1958, while studying at Cornell University, he visited Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia as an exchange student and he saw a crematorium at Auschwitz. “They’ve knocked them down, subsequently, but I remember it vividly,” he says, describing the experience as “mind-bending.”
Ehrlich, who has lived in Malibu since the early 1970’s, is a surgeon at UCLA. His interest in photography started at an early age, but was sidelined when he pursued his medical career. He picked photography up again about seven years ago “in a very serious manner” and his work has been shown in various museums and galleries around the world.
His photographs cover a wide range of subjects, including his travels in Namibia (which has been published as a book, “”Namibia: The Forbidden Zone”) and Vietnam, as well as the construction of the UCLA Medical center, and Malibu, all of which can be viewed on his website ehrlichphotography.com. “I’ve been fortunate to be very successful in a short period of time,” he says.
Ehrlich is currently working on his latest project, “The Art of the Body: the Body as Art,” which he expects to complete in six months and will be published as a book. “Being a doctor, I always wanted to do something that tied into it and I have a project using X-rays and MRIs.”
He says, “Because I’m a physician, I’ve gotten access to things most people don’t see.” He emphasizes that the exhibit is “not about diseases or medical things, per se, but about the beauty of the body—the artistic side.”
For now though, Ehrlich is concentrating on his exhibit, “The Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen,” and ensuring that images of this time stay alive so that history does not repeat itself.
“I didn’t know much about the Holocaust, but of course, now after this project, I know so much and it's a life-altering experience, there’s no question about it. You can’t believe anything like this ever happened.”