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In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941

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The origin of this book is in of itself remarkable. In the summer of 1941, Willie Georg (a German soldier stationed in Warsaw), was given a pass by his commanding officer that allowed him to enter the Warsaw Ghetto--a 1.36 square mile area into which 500,000 Jews had been packed. "There are some curious goings-on behind that wall," said the officer. "Take your [camera]...and bring back some photos of what you find." George did this, but the photographs he took have waited over five decades to see publication. Jewish scholar Rafael F. Scharf has collected these poignant, powerful images into a volume supplimented by excerpts from the diaries of Warsaw Ghetto Jews. The result is a book that brings the past to life with vivid and literally painful clarity. The Ghetto was deliberately created by the Nazis as a place for Jews to slowly died from hunger, cold and disease. (Georg's photos were taken a little less than a year before the death camps opened for large-scale business.) Every page is an portrait--in words or pictures--of people the reader knows almost certainly died before the war ended. It's impossible to look at these images without feeling a sense of loss on a purely human level. Old men, women, children, their faces gaunt with hunger, are seen still struggling to live a life of sorts, but it is clearly a struggle they are losing. IN THE WARSAW GHETTO is a reminder that every person who suffered and died under the Nazi regime was a fellow human being--that each and every one of those deaths was an ineffacable tragedy.

This book is a powerful reminder of a time we should never forget. In 1941 a German soldier Willy Georg went into the Warsaw Ghetto and took some pictures. Without meaning to he documented for history what life was like for the Jews in the Polish Ghetto before it was raised to the ground by the Nazis and most of its occupants massacred. Willy Georg is not a hero, he did nothing to help the people of the Ghetto, all he did was prove that they had existed at all. This book is tragic as it is magnificent. The accompanying text is concise and well written, showing the reader along with the photos how people lived and died in Warsaw during the early 1940s. This book should be on every library shelf and every school from Junior to High should have access to it. Sometimes pictures can speak louder than words and in this case it is more than true.

Georg, a professional German photographer, obtained permission to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, and to take pictures. Evidently not liking what they saw Georg doing, the Gestapo confiscated the film out of his camera. By then, however, he was on his fifth roll of film. The first four rolls remained hidden in his pocket, and are the ones made into the photos published in this book. The photos were taken in 1941, before Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were shipped to their deaths at Treblinka in 1942, and long before the Warsaw Ghetto was completely destroyed by the Germans after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

The photos show war damage, the crushing poverty, procedures done to extend food supplies, etc. Other photos show travel on human-power rickshaw, tram, or horse-drawn cart. Still other snapshots show sick and dying Jews prostrate on the pavements, everyone wearing the mandatory Star of David on the upper arm, peddlers of various goods, entertainment such as singing and dancing, and a boy selling the GAZETA ZYDOWSKA (JEWISH NEWSPAPER), a Nazi-approved publication.

The photos in this book are interspersed with texts lifted out of Jewish writers such as historian Emmanuel Ringelblum. They complement the photographs, and give a sense of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto. It is sobering and sad to realize that almost all the faces in these photographs were dead a year or two after the pictures were taken.