When honouring is painful

Eleonora is the only daughter of late “Holocaust hero, Sobibor Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History” as labels him a subtitle of a book called “Sasha Pechersky” by Selma Leydesdorff. “For the last 15 years I’m drawing a lot of attention from mass media, directors, writers, authorities. But nobody is interested in me – everyone wants to talk only about my father”. Eleonora is disturbed by all the buzz surrounding her father’s memory for one simple reason: it’s too late. While he was alive, he never got any attention. Just the opposite: he was ignored and humiliated in various ways by the Soviet regime. In 1948 he was fired because of his Jewish nationality and for the 5 next years all his attempts to find a job failed. Authorities didn’t want to listen to his story and recognize that he was actually a hero, a leader of a unique operation that helped 53 Jews escape from death at Sobibor Nazi concentration camp. Holocaust remained a suppressed topic during most of the Soviet era. An essay about Sobibor uprising written by famous Soviet writer Kataev was banned from publishing.

During the war, Sasha Pechersky’s family had no doubt that he was killed. Later he admitted that there were moments when he would prefer to be killed instead of going through all the humiliation. After he organized an uprising at Sobibor death camp and escaped with his mates from Nazis, he was detained by Soviet authorities who considered anyone ever captured by Nazis as traitors. Instead of praising Alexander’s heroism and courage, the authorities treated him as a criminal and sent him to a penal military unit for certain death - disciplinary battalions had no mercy to their soldiers. Statistically, no more than 1 out of 10 survived in such units. To his “luck”, Alexander was heavily wounded in a battle and sent to a hospital. That’s how he escaped.

When in 2018 a monument of Sasha Pechersky was inaugurated in Rostov, Eleonora who never goes out because of her Parkinson's disease, put together all her strength and attended the ceremony. A city mayor approached her and asked: “So, I guess you are happy now?” “How can I be happy when all of it is taking place 30 years after my father passed away?” she replied despairingly.

Eleonora’s childhood was full of war-time drama. Being a little girl she underestimated the danger and the cruelty of the moment. The summer of 1941 when the war began she spent like any other summer - in a small village not far from Stalingrad, with her grandmother. One day the village was occupied and set on fire by Nazis. Everything was burnt down. “The village was already in flames when I first saw Nazi aircrafts dropping bombs. I ran to my grandmother shouting “Nanny, they are dropping air balloons, let’s go catch them!”” 7-years-old Eleonora and her old grandmother had to leave their place and look for shelter. Eleonora went barefooted with nothing but a summer dress on her. All her clothes were destroyed in the fire. “I remember how we walked across a field when a Nazi aircraft approached. It was flying low and slow, it was there to kill. My grandmother pushed me to the ground and covered me with her body. She was heavy. I began crying and asking her to get off me, but she only whispered - “Hush, hush, keep silent, don’t let them discover us.”” Only by happy chance, Eleonora escaped death multiple times during the war. For two years she was hiding in the barns of good-hearted Russian farmers who were risking their life to save the Jewish girl.

Nowadays Eleonora lives alone in a neat 2-room flat where she knows by heart every centimeter of the walls: she often loses balance and falls down while walking. She prevents hard bumps by leaning onto the walls every time she feels she is about to fall. “I just lean on the wall and then slowly crawl down.”

Eleonora often experienced anti-Semitism in her life. Like her father, she also couldn’t find a job for quite a while. “I knew I was a brilliant economist, and all employers knew that as well. I’d come to a factory, they’d tell me that they will be happy to hire me, I just need to fill out a simple form. The form always had a “nationality” line. The next day the same people would stare away and make up some stupid reason to reject me. This scenario repeated everywhere for two years.” Being a son of a Jewish father and a Russian mother she never felt herself completely belonging to any nationality. “I was an alien for Russians, but there were also Jews who considered me an alien”.

Nowadays despite all the attention from famous strangers, journalists, filmmakers she feels lonely. She has a daughter who lives separately and rarely can help out because she needs to take care of her own family. She has some old friends, mostly coworkers, who are in touch with her, and, very importantly, “Hesed” Jewish charity homecare worker who cares about her on a regular basis.

Eleonora with Sveta, her Hesed curator

She is very grateful for this help but she also feels that she is dependent on the help of others, and this makes her desperate: “It’s extremely hard. All my life I was helping people, and now I’m dependent on everyone.”

Photographing an interview

Lisa Popova. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 2019. For JDC

Conducting an interview and taking pictures at the same time may sound overwhelming but this is a usual practice in social documentary photography. After 8 years of talking while shooting, I now feel as if something is missing when I silently click a shutter button or interview someone without a camera in my hands. However, this type of work is full of challenges and pitfalls. Here is how I navigate this territory.

Ice-breaking

Every interview is a journey, a story in its own right. It has a beginning, a climax, and a resolution. Acting in accordance with the arc of this story is key. Things inevitably go wrong when people try to bend the rules by forcing an interviewee headfirst into the depth of traumatic memories, screwing up the emotional peak or cutting short the ending.

Yakov Bronstein. Almaty, Kazakhstan. 2014. For JDC

Even with the best intents in mind, even being wholeheartedly welcomed, I nevertheless break into someone’s private life when I enter a home as an interviewer with a camera. Usually I only have 40-50 minutes for a home visit, and I come in as a total stranger! By the moment an interview starts, we should trust each other, we can’t be strangers anymore.

How to build trust in such a limited time? First off, regardless of introductions provided by anyone who accompanies me, I always introduce myself again. I announce clearly who I am, what I am going to do, with what purpose, and for whom. Often I tell something about myself. Not the whole life story, but some details that will make me relatable, that have some points of intersection with the interviewee. For example, I can point out that I had the same wallpaper pattern in my living room when I was a kid or that my uncle worked in this town years ago.

I try to dive naturally into an interview by blending it with the initial small talk. I start chatting about simple matters like weather or the photographs on the walls, I never announce formally that we’re starting the interview, just the questions and answers get deeper and deeper as the conversation goes.

For a while, I’m not taking any pictures. I let the camera sit on my lap as we talk. Even when I start snapping, in the beginning, it’s only for a person to get used to the awkward sound and look of the camera. While we’re passing the shallow water of the story, there’s nothing to capture there anyway.

Eye contact

Needless to say, eye contact is probably the most important ingredient of a sincere conversation. That’s the main tool for moderating the conversation, as well. Intensive eye contact confirms that whatever is being told is very important for me to hear. If I notice that the story is drifting away, I can easily show it without saying anything, just by moving my eyes away.

However, taking pictures requires breaking this eye contact, often at those very moments when it needs to be the tightest. Every time I bring the camera to my face I feel this inner pushback as if I’m doing something completely wrong.

Here is what’s important to remember in this regard: not every day people get asked about their life experience. In fact, it’s an extremely rare occasion. What usually happens when we are exploring our past? We’re reliving the distant events and disconnect from the current moment.

It’s only the interviewer who should be present in the moment. The interviewee is out there, on their own journey. If I did everything right, by the moment when we get to the peak of the interview, the person just doesn’t notice my camera anymore, it becomes invisible, non-existent. That’s the moment when I turn into a proverbial fly on the wall.

Galina Lev. St. Petersburg, Russia. 2017. For JDC

I always try to start taking pictures only when we’re deep enough into the conversation, and when I see that the gaze has changed, signaling me that the person doesn’t mind being photographed. That’s a gaze of someone who is not posing for a camera, who keeps being herself. If I grip a camera and nothing changes in the posture, intonations and facial expression of the interviewee, then I’m good to start photographing.

What to ask

An interview is always about the answers, not the questions. Of course, I prepare for each interview. I learn as much as I can beforehand about the biography and family situation, about the hardships and challenges. I write down a list of questions but I never pull it out. Arguably more important is how to ask than what to ask. It’s critical to go with the conversation and ask follow-up questions. Once I show that I’m interested in the story, once I’m curious enough about the details, the conversation flows without much effort.

I like to begin with quantitative questions and end with emotional ones. I can ask “how many years do you live in this house?” to put a person at ease, and end up asking “what do you feel when you wake up in this house?”, when I find it appropriate.

Variety of shots

I can’t bring back from a home visit just a couple of similar frames. I’m supposed to get a variety of shots: middle, wide, details. How to get them when I’m only sitting and conducting an interview?

One of the most efficient ways that I’ve discovered is to wrap up the sitting part and ask for a “tour” around the house. Most often people would say - of course, go ahead and take pictures wherever you want. I would reply - please be so kind to be my guide. I want the host in the frame, not the kitchen. I use this “tour” as an excuse to make shots in a variety of lighting situations, with a variety of backgrounds, but I don’t point it out because I don’t want them to think for a second that they are supposed to pose for me.

Luisa Kalenova. Rostov, Russia. 2019. For JDC

Of course, we keep talking during the “tour”, and quite often as we walk we get to some extremely important details of the life story which a person didn’t find appropriate to reveal while sitting.

Another way to get a variety of shots and at the same time to level up the interview is to ask about the most meaningful object or a photograph in the house. That’s what gets people to talk about their collection of cacti or their only photograph of the late dad, or the family library. These precious objects serve as a starting point for the most intimate stories.

Zulun Issakharov with a portrait of his late father. Dushanbe, Tajikistan. 2014.

Ethics

There is a very delicate balance between getting a vivid story filled with emotions and bringing people to a breakdown by asking them about their traumatic past. I never know which question will trigger a breakdown. Nobody can know. If by any chance I get there, that’s a red flag for me. I find it inappropriate to exploit this condition. I stop taking pictures and try to fix the situation. I must put a person at ease in order to continue. At this moment I’m not an interviewer, I’m someone who can listen with compassion and bring comfort. As a famous documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said: “You ought to conduct an interview as if you’re going to bump into them again after the film is out”.

I deal with the memories, and I should be very careful about bringing them to light. Sometimes an interview reminds a therapy session, but I keep in mind that this therapy is unsought. The interview will be over, I’ll go on with my own life, and the person, in many cases absolutely lonely, will stay one on one with the memories.

It’s always a huge honor for me to feel the trust of someone telling painful things about themselves. When at the end of an interview I thank them, I do so in the most sincere way.

Technical aspects

Camera

Photographing an interview puts some constraints on the way a photographer deals with the equipment. I use the first 5 minutes of small talk to make all the camera adjustments. I can afford to preview the pictures on the camera screen only before we get into a serious conversation. Even then, I just check briefly the histogram to make sure it’s not completely off. I have an automatic preview turned off on my camera, so the images don’t pop up on the screen on their own and don’t distract me. I make my eye focus on the composition and my mind on the conversation. I build a picture in my head before grabbing the camera, and only then I quickly snap it. The less time I spend looking through a viewfinder the better for the rhythm and flow of the interview.

Lens

Very often I have to deal with the dark and dull light of Soviet apartments. For these situations I used to carry around two camera bodies with speedy prime lenses: Nikon D750 with 50/1.4 and Nikon D700 with 20/2.8. Nowadays I’m using an amazing Nikkon 24-70/2.8 lens with my D750. It’s bulky but it’s still more convenient than having two bodies hanging on me.

Notes

I don’t rely on my memory to remember all the stories I capture — sometimes I hear a dozen of them in one day. I use my phone to record sound throughout the interview. I don’t use these recordings for anything but writing my notes. I make a quick note after every single visit, on my way to the next one. Usually, I put down just a few keywords which will then remind me what to look for in the recording. I tried all kinds of ways to save these notes, from a paper notebook to Evernote app. Paper notes were hard to use while riding in the car on the bumpy roads. Evernote was a bit too complicated. I ended up using Google Keep for these quick notes.

Backup

Upon getting back to a hotel the first thing I do is make copies of all the files of the day, including the audio files. I copy them to the laptop and to the external hard drive. Additionally, I make Dropbox do its job of uploading all of it to the cloud. Normally I don’t consider myself a backup freak, but things change when I’m on an assignment in the opposite corner of the world.

Ninel Nikolaeva. Almaty, Kazakhstan. For JDC

Clearing mind

Once the files are saved in multiple places, I lay down on the floor and rest for a while in a “dead body pose”. This is a necessary part of my work — a silent meditation that allows me to internalize all the stories I’ve heard and at the same time to separate myself from them. Without this separation a quick burnout is inevitable.

A woman that saved lives

"I stay strong when I tell my wartime story. But afterwards, as I stay on my own, I lay down and cry for hours."

Sofia Yarovaya is Righteous among the nations. She went through all the horrors of war, amplified by hiding Jewish neighbors in the very center of Nazi-occupied Kyiv (Ukraine).

Sofia was in her teens during the war. One day her mother took her own kids and the Jewish kids who were hiding in their house and went directly to the Nazi commandant's office. She told the commandant that she was the mother to all these children, and they all are Ukrainian, just some of them lost their documents. "There was a polizei sitting in the corner. He chuckled as my mom was telling this made-up story but didn't say anything, and the commandant issued the documents," remembers Sofia.

Sofia's secret job during the war was to help Soviet war prisoners escape from the trains upon arrival at Kyiv railway station. Apparently, she was risking her life every minute.

It takes several hours for Sofia to tell her story. She remembers vividly every small detail of those distant days, and she feels horrified again. "I'm not gonna tell the story anymore, it's too hard," promises Sofia to herself.

She used to be a teacher all her life and up to now she is full of dignity and strength. 47 former students, among others, attended her 90th anniversary in 2016.