The magazine of the photo-essay
Jan 2020 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
As many countries are reassessing their responses to mass immigration, Max
Hirshfeld, one of the great American photographers working today, delves deep into
the visual memory of the Holocaust - a subject difficult to grasp and almost
impossible to document - to share the story of his parents’ enduring love in a time of
war.
“Sweet Noise is special and compelling because it tells the larger history through the
lives of Max’s Polish-born parents, who met in 1943 in the Polish ghetto of Zawiercie
and had a secret romance while they waited to be deported to the death camps.” -
Stuart E. Eizenstat
Max’s parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, raised him in a small city in
Alabama where life in the South of the 1950s and 1960s was quiet and mostly idyllic.
But lurking under the surface was a remarkable yet tension-filled history that fully
revealed itself only after he had a family of his own. Max knew the outer perimeters
of his parents' story - the challenges of being Jewish in a place that increasingly
alienated them, their individual trajectories as they moved through adulthood, and
their chance meeting and secret romance in the Polish ghetto.
by Max Hirshfield
But it took a pilgrimage to Poland with his mother in 1993 (and the discovery of post-war letters between his parents)
to more fully acquaint him with the depths of their tragedies and the exceptional love story that sustained them
throughout separation until they were reunited in the USA in 1949.
Though Sweet Noise features events that began seventy-five years ago, the material is eerily timely. As Eastern Europe
grapples with this horrific legacy, and many countries are reassessing their responses to mass immigration, those in a
position to bear witness need a supportive environment wherein art and language serve to remind the world what can
occur when hatred and the concept of ethnic cleansing are given free rein.
Auschwitz Gate.
Auschwitz, Block 10.
Birkenau skylight.
Birkenau train terminal.
F & J.
Warsaw cemetery memorial.
Zawiercie cemetery.
Zawiercie home.
