In June 2003, when I was 32 years old, I travelled to Poland for a few days, alone, to close the chapter on a two-year relationship with a young woman who was born in Cracow. Perhaps by discovering the culture in which she had grown up I would come to terms with the separation. I had a little video camera with me and, from time to time, quite rarely, I shot some film. Including at Auschwitz.
My direct ancestors are Christians, although the alleged history of my Portuguese surname suggests possible distant episodes of forced conversion from Judaism. If memory serves, my motives for visiting the camp were probably those of any other average European: curiosity, a sense of duty, and to contemplate what men are capable of inflicting on other human beings. But then why did I shoot those video sequences at Auschwitz? Perhaps because I wanted the option of looking back over them, or was it as a way of maintaining my distance from the affect the visit aroused? Or was I hoping to glean from the images an essence, a revelation, so seldom possible in this age of mass tourism?
Once back in Paris, I felt it was pointless to keep the video: the images would look flat. They would certainly show nothing more than any of the other films taken by the thousands of visitors who make their way to Auschwitz each year: the sign ‘Arbeit macht Frei’, the brick buildings which bizarrely resemble certain university campuses, and rows of black-and-white photos of the inmates’ harrowing stares. I do not have the temperament of an archivist, nor am I in the habit of fetishising whatever might induce a sense of guilt regarding the past. I imagine that in this I am again pretty similar to the average European. The events that took place at Auschwitz seem to belong to another world, another humanity, to a savagery that seems alien.
