To the bathhouse!

The title inscription Zum Bade [To the Bathhouse] is one of the most tragic euphemisms of the Age of Furnaces. This was the inscription over the entrance to the crematoria in the death camps. Celnikier was in two of them – Stutthof and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although he could not witness the gassing of the victims, his engraving is highly suggestive – naked prisoners with emaciated bodies raise their arms in the air, resembling extinguishing candles; some slump to the ground. The tangle of thickened and then thinned lines and strokes that fills the frame tightly creates spots and contours from which emerges a claustrophobic visual narrative from the vestibule of death, or perhaps more accurately, from beyond the threshold of hell.

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