Unpublished photos of the Warsaw ghetto, found in an attic, 80 years later

“An invaluable document”.

A film with unique photos of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, taken in secret by a Polish firefighter at the time of the uprising 80 years ago, was presented this Wednesday in the Polish capital.

A total of 33 photos of the ghetto appear on this film miraculously found in December.

They were all taken by Zbigniew Grzywaczewski, a Polish firefighter called to put out fires started by the Nazis after the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 1943.

Only 12 photos from this film were known until now, but only as imprints on poor quality paper, tightly framed, the film itself having long been untraceable.

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The fingerprints were passed on by the author to a Jewish family who hid in their apartment during the war and later emigrated to the United States.

In the 1990s, she donated them to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington.

About six months ago, the organizers of the upcoming exhibition, who knew of these shots, contacted the photographer's family, hoping to find more.

And it was Zbigniew's son, Maciej, who found the old film with damaged edges in a box forgotten for decades, containing the photographic archives of his father, who died in 1993.

"In the last box of the last of the boxes"

“My father never told us that he took pictures in the ghetto, maybe because it was too hard.

Not so long ago, I learned that his photos were in Washington,” said Maciej Grzywaczewski.

“At the request of the curator of the exhibition, I started looking, for a long time without success.

Finally, looking in the last box of the last of the boxes containing my father's photographic archives, I found this film.

The photos do not represent the fighting during the uprising.

On one of them, taken from above, a group of Jews - men, women and children - is escorted by German soldiers, weapons in hand, towards Umschlagplatz, the place of departure towards the extermination camps.

On another, in a deserted street, thick smoke coats buildings, rubble and cables litter the roadway.

On the third, firefighters put out the burning buildings.

AFP/Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski AFP or licensors

"These are the only known photos that are not taken by the Germans (in the ghetto during the uprising) and that are not made for propaganda purposes," explained Zuzanna Schnepf-Kolacz, one of the commissioners of the exhibition “Around us, a sea of ​​fire”, which will present them to the general public from April.

"Photos taken by the Germans constitute the bulk of the photographic documentation of the Holocaust", which means that "today we imagine the ghetto through their eyes", explained historian Jacek Leociak, during a lecture at the Polin Jewish History Museum.

This film is therefore “an invaluable document because it goes beyond this German perspective, (…) this perspective of the executioners, who photographed the Jews as dehumanized, anonymous victims”, he added.

The Warsaw Ghetto was created by the Germans a year after the invasion of Poland in 1939. Their goal was to exterminate its inhabitants through starvation and disease, or to deport them to the Treblinka death camp, 80 km east of Warsaw.

On April 19, 1943, a few hundred Jewish fighters attacked the Nazis, preferring to die with weapons in hand rather than take the path to the gas chambers.

The author of the photos, Zbigniew Grzywaczewski, also kept a diary during the war.

In May 1943, he wrote: “I will keep, I think, all my life in my head the image (…) of silhouettes tottering with hunger and dread, dirty, torn.

Of (these people) shot massively, the living tripping over the corpses of those who were slaughtered”.