The former fashion photographer could have ended up there himself but escaped from a prisoner of war train bound for Germany and later joined the French Resistance.
Schwab, who was born in Hamburg to a French father and a German Jewish mother, was one of the first photographers to work for AFP after it was refounded in August 1944 as Paris was liberated.
He followed the Allied troops as they advanced into Germany as a war correspondent, becoming a witness to the horrors discovered as they entered the Nazi death camps.
For Schwab it was also deeply personal, a quest to find his mother Elsbeth, who was deported in 1943. He had heard nothing of her since she was taken.
Witness
One of Schwab’s first published photographs is of the entrance gate to the Buchenwald camp, bearing the terrible inscription “Jedem das Seine” (“To each what he deserves”).
