WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The Museum of Jewish History in Warsaw on Wednesday presented a group of photographs taken in secret during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, some of which have never been seen before, which were recently discovered in a family collection.
The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews described the discovery of negatives with around 20 previously unseen images as a significant discovery.
The photos were taken inside the Warsaw Ghetto by a Polish firefighter, Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, as Nazi Germans brutally crushed the 1943 uprising. As the Germans burned down the ghetto, they called in Polish firefighters to prevent the flames engulf nearby buildings. out of the ghetto.
Museum historians have said that the value of the Grzywaczewski images lies in the fact that they are the only known images of the ghetto uprising that were not taken by German forces, and therefore were not taken with the intention of serving Nazi propaganda.
Grzywaczewski, then 23, whose family members risked their lives to save Jews, took his camera into the ghetto and secretly photographed Jews being taken to Umschlagplatz, the detention area where German occupying forces held them before their deportation to the Treblinka. death camp. The footage also shows buildings on fire.
Grzywaczewski’s son, Maciej Grzywaczewski, recently found negatives with the images in the collection of his father, who died in 1993. He said he became very emotional when he found them.
Some of his father’s other images, including photos showing the deported Jews, are held by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
POLIN says the discovery adds more footage to the deportation footage. Additionally, those in Washington are prints that have been cropped, with the newly discovered negatives providing more detail.
Some of the photos are out of focus or out of focus, indicating that Grzywaczewski, who was an avid photographer, took them surreptitiously.
The newly discovered images will be included in an exhibition at the POLIN Museum titled “Around Us a Sea of Fire”, which will open on April 18, the day before the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
It began on April 19, 1943, after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving residents. Some 750 young Jewish fighters armed only with pistols and other small arms attacked a German force more than three times as large. In their last wills, they said they knew they were doomed, but they wanted to die at a time and place of their choosing.
In the end, the fighters held out for almost a month, longer than some countries overrun by Germany.
It was the largest Jewish uprising during World War II and the first major urban revolt against German occupation in Europe. On May 16, 1943, the Germans had crushed the uprising and deported the survivors of the ghetto to concentration and death camps.
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