A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE WARSAW GHETTO--THROUGH ENEMY EYES?
Photographs are rarely neutral, value-free depictions of the images and individuals caught
by the eye of the camera. A photograph illustrates not only the person or scene being
captured, but it can tell us much about the person taking the picture – their perspective,
attitude, and their relationship to what is being photographed. During the Holocaust,
German photographers deliberately photographed Jews in the most unfavorable light to
promote the Nazi image of the Jew as inferior, unworthy, and dangerous. Sadly, these
German photographs are the images most often used in books, movies, and exhibitions to
illustrate the events of the Holocaust. The unintended result is that Jews under Nazi
domination are too often depicted as passive objects -- rather than active subjects -- in the
portrayal of their catastrophe.
Indeed, in trying to understand the history of the Holocaust, we must rely on Nazi
documentary material including, official reports, orders, and statistical data. This reliance is
necessitated by the relative lack of Jewish sources. Prior to German occupation, the Jewish
communities in Europe were not official governmental bodies which maintained municipal
records and archives. Ironically, when the Germans ordered the establishment of the
Jewish Councils in 1939, they forced Jewish communities throughout occupied Europe to
become “autonomous” municipal bodies, which created infrastructures to confront and
deal with a wide variety of Jewish needs and services, such as, housing, health, sanitation,
education, and employment. These efforts were documented, and the resulting records
were stored in archives. Tragically, most of these collections, which constitute the “Jewish”
documentation, were destroyed along with the individuals and communities whose lives
and activities they chronicled. The precious few archives of the Jewish Councils that
survived (e.g. Lodz, Bialystok, Lublin, Amsterdam), as well as various ghetto underground
initiatives to document the Holocaust , like the rescued clandestine Oyneg Shabbes (Oneg
Shabbat/Joy of Sabbath) archives established by Emanuel Ringelblum and his dedicated
colleagues in Warsaw, afford us an invaluable source of documentation from the Jewish
perspective.
The scarcity of Jewish documentation is especially pronounced in the visual record of the
Holocaust. Among the few precious exceptions are the works of art, secretly created by
Jewish artists in ghettos and camps under the most adverse circumstances, and a
surprising number of photographs from the likes of Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross,
who took pictures in the Lodz Ghetto, and George Kadish [Hirsch Kadushin] who
photographed the Kovno Ghetto. Their images illustrate how they used their cameras as
weapons against forgetting -- a form of resistance to record the grim realities of Jewish life.
“I don't have a gun,” noted Kadish, “The murderers are gone. My camera will be my
revenge.” These Jewish photographers took great risks to photograph ghetto life.
Operating clandestinely, they secretly captured the brutality of Jewish life as well as the
heroic ways in which Jews resisted dehumanization by continuing their religious practices,
education, and culture under unimaginable circumstances. Remarkably, even in the hell of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, David Szmulewski and his fellow Greek -Jewish
inmates were able to take a few clandestine photographs of the murder-process at
Auschwitz, which were smuggled out by the Polish underground and preserved for
posterity.
With such limited visual documentation from Jewish sources, one is often forced to rely
upon the extensive German photographic record of stills and, especially, film. These derive
from two major sources: official German propaganda units and numerous amateur
photographers, who, as German soldiers and policemen, witnessed or played an active role
in the “Final Solution.” In fact, unofficial, amateur picture-taking was so widespread that it
was banned in July 1941 by the German Army as well as the SS and Police. German
photographs taken of Jews --- both official and unofficial – can be said to extend the
persecution of their subjects by recording their misfortune, extending and preserving
crude stereotypes, and objectifying the Jews as victims. In an early album of such
photographs published in Germany in 1960, The Yellow Star, editor Gerhard Schoenberner,
accurately notes: “The people shown here had no choice but to have their photographs
taken… The photographers took pains to photograph their subjects in as unfavorable a light
as possible.”
Heinz Joest’s photographs are clearly an exception. They show his empathy and concern for
the victims of the tragedy unfolding before his eyes. In this regard, his attitude and
photographs are similar to those of another “unofficial” German photographer of the
Warsaw Ghetto, Joe Heydecker. Like Heydecker, Joest entered the ghetto against orders
which banned Germans from entering the Ghetto for fear of contagious disease. What were
Joest’s motives? Other than being curious about what was going inside the Ghetto walls, he
left us no clear answer. Yet his photographs seem to be motivated by more than a simple
desire to satisfy curiosity. Perhaps, Joest’s motives were similar to those of Heydecker,
who wrote that he took the photographs so that “the shame should not be forgotten.” He
wanted to “keep alive the shriek” that he “wanted the world to hear.”
Joest’s 137 photographs were “discovered” in 1982 and exhibited for the first time at Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem in 1988. Since then, the exhibition has been displayed in venues
around the world and has contributed to a measure of dignity and humanity to the victims
and survivors of the Holocaust that is long overdue.
Yitzchak Mais
Jerusalem, 2010
Yitzchak Mais, Curator of A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto, was director of the Yad Vashem
Historical Museum in Jerusalem (1983-95) and founding Curator of the Museum of Jewish
Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York. A distinguished public historian,
he has written for various scholarly and educational publications, and developed museum
projects on Jewish history, and the Holocaust in Jerusalem, Kiev, Montreal, Moscow and
New York. He co-curated the recently opened Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education
Center in Skokie.