Outside the frame
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
Johannes Hähle arrived in Kyiv at the beginning of October 1941 in the ranks of the German army.
A talented photographer, he was attached to the Propagandakompanie 637. Walking around Kyiv, which had recently been occupied by German troops, he photographed what impressed him the most, using up an entire roll of Agfacolor-neu. He made his way to the Babyn Yar ravine, which was then on the outskirts of the city. Today, converted into a park, it is part of the urban fabric. There he photographed the aftermath of the massacre of Jews that the Einsatzgruppe C of the SS had carried out on the 29th and 30th of September. He photographed the heaps of clothing and the personal belongings of the victims that were scattered across the ground. He snapped a crowd of Soviet prisoners of war that were guarded by SS soldiers. Wielding shovels, the prisoners smoothed the bottom of the ravine where more than 33,000 people were buried, having been executed in the space of 48 hours.
There had been no fighting between Soviet and German troops in the streets of Kyiv, but corpses were strewn in the streets. Hähle photographed them with the fascination with which the living stoop over the dead, mainly in time of war, when death reaches up, crawls out and surrounds us. In a poem entitled “Truth”, the Ukranian poet Andriy Lyubka, born in 1987, writes:
I love being photographed most
in naked landscapes—say, in autumn. I regret
that it’s impossible to photograph smell,
what remains outside the frame.1
It was autumn in Kyiv. We don’t know whether Hähle regretted that he couldn’t photograph the smell of the landscapes and that which remains outside the frame. In one of the photographs he took that day there are two dead bodies, five living beings, and a detail which sits in the frame but as if it were outside, because at first we don’t notice it. I don’t know if Hähle himself noticed it. Our eyes, like Hähle’s, rest insistently on the corpses in the foreground, almost certainly Soviet prisoners of war, and on the three women who are hurrying up the road, seemingly indifferent to the macabre spectacle at their feet but, more than over the presence and stench of death—that smell which Andriy Lybuka speaks of and is not recorded on film—they are most likely fearful in the presence of German soldiers. Death is a naked landscape in autumn.
Photo source: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
In the background of the image is entry to a building. A Christian cross is traced on it in white paint. This cross was painted by the locals when they realised that the massacre of the city’s Jews in Babyn Yar was imminent. It was what Christians did, from time immemorial, when there was a pogrom. They would mark crosses on the doors to protect themselves from the unchecked violence. The cross converted the door into a threshold between life and death: from this line forward, there are no scapegoats. In Oedipus the King, Sophocles puts these words into the protagonist’s mouth in response to the pleas of the inhabitants of Thebes who are begging him for a cure for the plague that is decimating the city:
I know you are all sick at heart.
And yet not one of you knows sickness
that can equal mine—for each of you is suffering singly
for himself alone, whereas my heart aches
for our land as well as for you and me.2
The others suffer individually. Oedipus, for his part, perhaps with a certain arrogance, claims to suffer for everyone. It is true that he is King of Thebes, but how many monarchs were indifferent to the fate of their subjects? Human as we are, we cannot permit all of the pain of the city, all of the pain of the world, to fall on our shoulders. But we lack the arrogance to meddle in things that are none of our business, to take the role of monarchs, to become the Oedipus of our Thebes. The two dead people in the photograph were murdered by gunshots to the head, probably because they couldn’t keep up with the rest of the column of prisoners on the march. Someone stole their boots—beyond price in times of scarcity. Two hens are scratching and pecking on the grassy slope. At that time cities, even larger cities, were still a natural extension of the countryside.
In Lviv, a small yet magnificent museum called Territory of Terror tells the tragic history of the colonialism to which Ukraine was subjected by the Nazis and the Soviets. On the wall of the last room there is the black and white photograph of a smiling couple, a still youthful man and woman. A text written by Oksana Dovgopolova, a philosopher from Odesa, accompanies the photo. The photo was taken in a village called Inta, in Russia, in the Arctic region of the Urals. There was a Stalinist forced labor camp in Inta, part of the Gulag. The man and the woman in the picture, both Ukranians, were deported there after the Second World War. In the text, Dovgopolova challenges our expectations when we look at such a photograph. Knowing that they are a married couple who have been deported, we tend, she says, to feel puzzled, even a little uncomfortable, seeing them smile. Perhaps we think they should look sad, dirty, wretched. Perhaps we think that a photograph like that should not be exhibited in a museum dedicated to terror because it suggests that, at the end of the day, the Soviet concentration camps weren’t as bad as all that. However, she says, faced with the implacable machinery of a repressive state, we only have a few ways to fight back. “You can win in different ways, sometimes just by staying alive.» She concludes with this idea: “Sometimes recording your smile in a photograph is the only sign of resistance.”
Photo: Paulo Faria
Johannes Hähle, who was thirty-five in 1941, accompanied the German army as it proceeded toward the east. On October 16 he was in Lubny, 200 kilometres to the east of Kyiv. He photographed the operation to exterminate around 1800 Jews in the city. Strictly speaking, he took photographs of preparations for the operation: Jews walking toward the meeting place, on the outskirts, loaded with their packages and bundles. Men, women, children. They gather in a field, in the open air, surrounded by armed guards. They are wearing thick coats. It must be cold. Again, it is a bare landscape in mid-autumn. This time, Hähle used a black and white roll. Then, the people undress until they are in shirtsleeves. The overcoats pile up. They move away in little groups, far from here. In Kyiv, Hähle photographed the aftermath of the massacre. In Lubny, he captured the prologue.
They came well wrapped up, not only because of the cold but because they were ordered to. Hähle’s first two photographs taken on that day of October 16, almost identical, show one of the posters put up by the occupying authorities summoning all the city’s Jews, at nine o’clock, to a precise address, on the outskirts, “with a view to resettlement.” Perhaps Hähle was afraid that the first photograph was out of focus, so he took another. The posters are bilingual, the message written in Ukranian on the left side, Russian on the right. In fact, they are trilingual, because the text is repeated in smaller letters at the foot of the page, translated into German. “You must bring food for three days and warm clothing.” The poster is a treatise on deception and violence. “Anyone who fails to obey this order will be SHOT.” Just like that, in capital letters. “Anyone who enters the locked houses of the Jews without authorisation or goes there to rob will be SHOT.” The text is almost identical to the one used in Kyiv to summon the Jews to the massacre of Babyn Yar on the morning of September 29. The Germans used a more or less fixed model, limiting themselves to changing the name of the city and the gathering place. The poster ends with an appeal to the most vile sentiments of the human being: “The Aryan (Ukranian and Russian) inhabitants of the city are asked to denounce those Jews who do not obey this order.”
I once saw an interview with Paul McCartney in which he told how, at the very beginning of the Beatles, when the four were travelling in an unheated van to give concerts, in full English winter, it was so cold that they sometimes laid down on the back seats, one on top of the other, in order to warm up. And he added: “We went through a lot, we fell out with each other, we drew apart, but we always kept this, the place we came from, a place of friendship and love.” As if some kind of cement joined those men together and resisted all the annoyances, real and imagined, with the passing of years, the jealousy and the grievances and misunderstandings, like an enduring bedrock beneath what our eyes can see. Outside the frame. When this cement disappears, this heat shared among human beings, this impulse to extend a hand to whoever cannot keep up with the march, barbarity sets in, and all kinds of violence become possible. In Oedipus the King, announcing the appearance on stage of Oedipus, already blind, the Messenger says that the King is now “a spectacle/that even one who loathes it must yet pity.”3
We must never allow this pity to be extinguished, even when hatred appears to win the day.
In one of the images collected by Hähle at the beginning of the operation, a group is walking along the road, towards the gathering place named on the poster. At the head, a boy advances with two women. One must be the mother, the other the grandmother. The boy is looking at the lens of the camera and, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, he gives a big smile. We can think that, at that early morning hour, the boy did not know he was going to die on that 16th of October, 1941. It is the simplest interpretation of the image, the one that meets our expectations. The opposite interpretation—thinking that the boy understood what was going to happen but, even so, he made a point of smiling—leaves us puzzled and even a little uncomfortable. It occurs to me that the smile fulfils precisely the exact opposite function of the cross of Christ painted on a door during a pogrom. The cross says: inside here we are safe from death. The smile says: you and I are the same, we are equally defenceless, perhaps you don’t know it now, but one day you will understand.
Photo source: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
I am mainly interested, however, once again, in “what remains outside the frame.” In other words, Hähle himself. He did not hand over these two rolls of photographs to his hierarchical superiors. He kept them for himself, hid them, breaking the rules, since it was forbidden to photograph the exterminations carried out in the rearguard of the troops—even if it was only the preamble or the aftermath. Hähle died in combat in Normandy in 1944, but his widow kept the negatives and this was how they have come down to us. We know nothing about Hähle’s motivations—in fact, he was a member of the Nazi Party—but perhaps he might have guessed that, faced with such images, “even one who loathes it must yet pity.” Keeping the photographs—whatever the underlying reason—was an act of subversion. As subversive as the smiles of the deported couple, as subversive as the smile of the boy who is going to die with a bullet to his head and perhaps even knows it at the moment of the smile. The epidemic that is decimating the city is indifference and cruelty. Hiding the images of the massacre and preventing them from being lost is, after all, to take the role of Oedipus in our Thebes. Perhaps the truly subversive acts are gestures we perform without knowing why. Perhaps what really matters, what saves us in the end, remains always outside the frame.
January 2026
1 Translated by Yulia Lyubka and Kate Tsurkan.
2 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oliver Taplin (translator), Oxford University Press, 2025.
3 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oliver Taplin (translator), Oxford University Press, 2025.