Page - 30 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

30 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt The document, known as the Jaeger Report, has the official title Complete tabulation of executions carried out in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone up to December 1, 1941 (figure 14).44 The document lists towns in Lithuania in one column, followed by dates in a second, number of Jews in a third and numbers of women, children and others in a fourth. The horror of read- ing this ordered, comprehensive list of murders carried out over a short period of time in 1941 was overwhelming. Without wanting or intending to, we found out while reading the list that Rokiskis featured as one of the sites. Over the course of two days, 15–16 August 1941, ‘3,200 Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish Children’ were murdered (in addition to more than 1,000 who had been killed in the preceding two months).45 And in other sources we found out that over 1,000 Jewish people were also killed at nearby Obeliai, where Beinarts also lived. The actual sites of the murders were woods outside the town, and later I was able to find on a website called the ‘Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania’ the precise sites where the murders took place. The report in the museum notes that the victims “were taken 4.5 km from the town to woods outside the village of Bajorai”.46 There is a short comment in Jaeger’s notes on how dif- ficult it had been to locate the precise site of the murders and that it was only possible with the assistance of local Lithuanians. The note also highlighted the complicity of Lithuanians in the killings. In the next room, I saw a photograph of one of these shootings, an image similar to the one described by Jacobson. A row of naked women carrying their babies, also naked, are lined up in a wood. The women are holding the babies in a protective way, as if trying to shield them from what is about to happen. They are about to be shot. Their nakedness makes them extremely vulnerable, and the onlooker must have been aware of the terrible truth of this when taking the photograph, as the women would have been facing a line of men with guns. Jacobson discusses how the photographs could not have been taken in an officially sanctioned way by any correspondent, neutral or otherwise: the German authorities wanted to keep these Einsatz actions secret, since they were afraid of the reactions from abroad, the possibility of Jews being forewarned, and the need to preserve the “decency and discipline” of their troops.47 Jacobson posits that it was ‘sadistic prurience’ that animated the photographer – the photograph was a trophy for future examination.48 That the light from the bodies of the women and their babies in that moment was made permanent in the photographic image, which then acts as a referent to the event, seems an act of scarring. It is a trace that wounds and that retains its power to hurt. In wounding in this man- ner, this photograph is one of Barthes’s punctums. Barthes maintained that the punctum has an often-metonymic power of expansion. He describes how, on seeing a photograph by Andre 44 Karl Jäger, Commander of the Security Police and the SD, Einsatzkommando 3, Complete tabulation of exe- cutions carried out in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone up to December 1, 1941 (1 December 1941); ‘The Jaeger Report: A chronicle of Nazi mass murder’ (English translation of the report along with scanned images of the original), Kauen: The Holocaust History Project, 1–9. The document is available at: <http://phdn.org/archives/ holocaust-history.org/works/jaeger-report/htm/img002.htm.en.html> [accessed 13 July 2017]. 45 ‘Documentation of the Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jewry by the SS Einsatzgruppen (Action Groups)’, from a Secret Reich Letter dated 1 December 1941, from the Remember website, <http://remember.org/docss.html> [accessed 13 July 2017]. 46 Ibid. 47 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, p. 129. 48 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, p. 130.