Publishing Department

An album publication consisting of photographs and film frames selected from numerous photo and film archives in Poland and around the world. These visual testimonies were created between 1940 and 1948 in the Warsaw Ghetto and its ruins. The presented selection and arrangement are the original concept of Anna Duńczyk-Szulc and Agnieszka Kajczyk.

The paintings show multiplied views of Warsaw of that period – videos recorded by propaganda units and amateurs, photographs taken by soldiers and members of the resistance movement, women and men.

Putting them side by side gives a surprising effect: a multiplication of points of view, directions of shots, times of the day, as well as ways of photographing and accompanying emotions. These shots become a universal story about the practices of imaging during the war, but also – thanks to the regaining of the meaning of the frames and learning the intentions of the authors – they enable the reader to take the side of the victims. The visual history of the creation of the ghetto, its functioning, the uprising, the liquidation, and the existence of the "post-ghetto" are combined into one story existing in various memories, narratives, and countries: in Poland, Germany, the United States, and Israel.

In this book, some unknown materials from the ghetto uprising will be published for the first time. Photographs and videos come from the JHI and the Museum of Warsaw, as well as from the Institute of National Remembrance, the State Archives in Warsaw, the Central Archives of Modern Records, The National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute (FINA), from Yad Vashem and Ghetto Fighters' House Museum in Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and YIVO from the United States, as well as from the Bundesarchiv in Germany.

In addition to the visual material, the publication includes texts by the renowned researcher Janina Struk, author of the pioneering monograph Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence, and Dr.

Tomasz Szerszeń, cultural anthropologist, and author of the award-winning book Wszystkie wojny świata (All the Wars of the World).

You can buy the book at Tłomackie Bookstore

The publication is available also as an e-book

Publication co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage