A review by varunob
The Photographer of Mauthausen by Salva Rubio, Pedro Columbo

adventurous dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

3.25

 

We know of a place called Auschwitz, one of the six camps created by the Nazis purely for the purpose of extermination. Dachau outside Munich was the first mass internment camp. You see, the Nazis were the perfect definition of “method to madness”. There were various types of camps and sub-camps, filled largely based on the fate that awaited their occupants.

Mauthausen in Upper Austria was a camp where extermination through labour was the preferred method of murder. Unlike other camps, it was also home largely to the intelligentsia.

Among the prisoners at Mauthausen was an engineer called Simon Wiesenthal, who would make a name for himself hunting down Nazis in the post-War world. A lesser-known prisoner was the Spaniard Francesc Boix, a Communist who had been forced to flee his homeland after Franco’s victory and had taken refuge in France, which soon fell into German hands. It is Boix’s story that the comic The Photographer of Mauthausen seeks to tell.

Boix was a photographer during the Spanish Civil War and at Mauthausen, he was put to work developing photographs of the camp and the events taking place inside it for the Nazis. Boix would, in his time at the lab in Mauthausen, be a pivotal part of the smuggling out of three thousand negatives detailing the horrors of the camp.

The comic is well-written, in particular the second scene where the reader accompanies Boix to the camp, and covers all parts of Boix’s life at and just after Mauthausen in a manner that is compelling, while still doing justice and being respectful of the fact that it is, at the end of the day, about a person’s life in a concentration camp. What I didn’t like was the opening, nor the attempt of writer Salva Rubio to draw us emotionally closer to Boix through his desire to reunite with his sister. It felt clumsy. The narrative also doesn’t really give you a sense of time (Boix was imprisoned for four years) apart from just drop dates here and there.

Much of the flow of the comic is thanks to illustrator Pedro J. Colombo and colourist Aintzaine Landa, whose panels are to be marvelled at. The format is naturally dependent on their skill, and they shine through. Colombo is especially terrific in his recreation of Mauthausen and his depiction of faces, though I do wonder why he didn’t take greater care to portray the fatigue of the camps over a period of time. Landa’s distinct palettes in depicting the world of the camp and that which is outside it also stand out. Cold greys and murky browns fill page upon page, and the sudden appearance of a bright green or a pleasant yellow is as much a stylistic choice as one of appreciating just what the camps were.

The Photographer of Mauthausen stumbles along the way but does a fair job in telling the story of Francesc Boix. The greater win here is how it succeeds in making part of the Holocaust accessible without trying to alter history.

I was able to view a copy of the book thanks to NetGalley and the publishers Dead Reckoning in exchange for a review.