Les anges d'Auschwitz #[nn]

The cover of this 2020 Editions Paquet release confronts the reader immediately and unflinchingly: a grid of prisoner identification photographs, each depicting a different individual in the striped uniform of Auschwitz, their numbered KL Auschwitz placards rendered in stark, careful detail by Emilio Van Der Zuiden. Stephen Desberg and Van Der Zuiden have crafted something that feels simultaneously like a memorial and a document — the repetition of faces across that red-framed grid carrying immense weight before a single page is turned. A sobering and necessary work.