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Hand-colored glass slide

Object | Accession Number: 2003.214.166 | RG Number: RG-10.479

Four Polish women view with anguish the bodies of those killed in a field in Warsaw, where they were digging for potatoes during the siege of the capital. In the words of photographer Julien Bryan, "As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all. Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food. But the Nazi fliers were not satisfied with their work. In a few minutes they came back and swooped down to within two hundred feet of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow." [Source: Bryan, Julien. "Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited." Warsaw, Polonia, 1959, pp.20-21.]

Date
1939 September
Classification
Photographs
Object Type
Lantern slides (lcsh)
Credit Line
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Julien Bryan Archive
 
Record last modified: 2022-07-28 17:51:02
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn38900