They are exquisitely ordinary family snapshots: six young men and women on the beach, playfully arranged in a pyramid; a bourgeois family flaunting its Sabbath best of fur-lined topcoats and rakishly angled hats; a dark-haired Orthodox mother with an infant cradled in her arms and her five children, three barefoot, lined up stiffly in front of a tumbledown shack.
There are dozens of other photographs just as posed and stilted, and strangers scanning them might barely pause for a second glance — except for one fact. Almost all these Polish Jews, rich and poor alike, would be dead within a few years, massacred in the Nazi camps or ghettoes or consumed by the war. One woman in the beach pyramid, a caption says, perished in the Soviet Union, searching for her husband as they fled the Nazis.
To read the rest of this article by Joseph Berger, please click here.
“And I Still See Their Faces” continues through June 24 at the Yeshiva University Museum, in the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, Flatiron district; (212) 294-8330, yumuseum.org.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
4 Comments
I won’t be able to see the exhibit in NY, but the photos I saw on the internet were so moving because of their vitality which, in turn, is a reminder of everything we have lost. These photos also are a reminder of how close civilization is to bloody anarchy. These were people just like us and they got trapped and dumped into the maw of a genocidal beast — a beast that was, at one time, considered the most civilized country in the world.
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Interesting, Michael. When I occasionally told people during my trip that I was there to visit family origins (+ Auschwitz, so “destinations” too, I guess), I tended to be met with a mixture of wonder & guilt or a bit of grudging indifference. One time with hostility.
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I like Warsaw. It is the largest, most vibrant, and I think most recovered from communism city in central Europe. (As I have written before, there is something gloriously cinematic about the place, too). However, it is a city where 70 years ago there were half a million Jews, and now there are none, and where the reason for this is that the Jews were all murdered. This is something terrible that hangs over the city, and hangs over the whole country, and thoughtful Poles realise this. (Of course, most people don’t think about it and go about their lives. And some of the most vicious anti-Semitic graffiti I have ever seen was actually inside the former Warsaw ghetto, although that was 15 years ago. Everything is mixed).
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Thanks. I really hope your readers go take these images in.
I took a couple of rolls (35mm, old style) of pictures of Bialystok, Poland’s Jewish cemetery during my visit. Two of the more “picturesque” ones here are posted here.
The most mysterious and troubling tombstone (to me) was the one that said, only, “1940″.
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