LATE JANUARY, a bitter wind, and we are going to Auschwitz. Before the wide Birkenau gatehouse, alongside the train tracks to the crematoria, sit the presidents of Germany and Israel, the kings of Spain and the Netherlands; also some two hundred men and women wearing blue-and-white-striped kerchiefs or hats, very old: the last survivors. Marian Turski, ninety-three, a Polish journalist, standing at the gate, says almost nothing about what he endured here. Instead, he tells the assembly of the earlier humiliations of the 1930s, how people barred from shops and swimming pools soon became “people who spread germs, diseases, and epidemics.” He talks about the American South in the ’60s, where his fellow marchers to Montgomery, Alabama, asked him if another Holocaust could happen in the US. He told them yes; tells his American grandchildren yes, now, if they stand by. “Because,” says Turski in front of the gate through which his skeletal, seventy-pound body was force-marched in January 1945, “if you become complacent, before you know it, some kind of Auschwitz will suddenly appear from nowhere.”
In the weeks before the New York coronavirus outbreak, I spent whole days looking at images from the death camp: wire photos from the memorial for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation; influencers’ shocking selfies with an Auschwitz geotag; historical documentation of the facility’s largest subcamp, Birkenau, where approximately one million people were murdered, more than 90 percent of them Jews. But the four photographs I have looked at hardest were at the Met Breuer, in the culminating gallery of “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All”: the final exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s unhappy satellite space, years in the making, vanished in days. At its dark heart were four paintings called Birkenau, which the German artist completed in 2014: abstract pictures, each eight-and-a-half feet tall, mostly gray, tipped with magenta and prasine green, uncommonly chafed and divoted. Beside them were four blurry black-and-white source photographs, which Richter initially tried to paint, then squeegeed clean. They were shot in secret by a member of the Sonderkommando in August 1944, and they depict, barely, a forest and a bonfire; depict, barely, a heap of burning bodies and women being marched naked to the gas chambers.