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A destitute Jewish woman sits against a wall on the street in the Warsaw ghetto.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 20580
A destitute Jewish woman sits against a wall on the street in the Warsaw ghetto.

A destitute Jewish woman sits against a wall on the street in the Warsaw ghetto.

Photographer
Willy Georg
Date
June 1941 - August 1941
Locale
Warsaw, Poland
Variant Locale
Warszawa
Varshava
Warschau
Photo Designation
GHETTOS (MAJOR) -- WARSAW (Poland) -- Destitution/Foraging
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rafael Scharf

About This Photograph

Biography
Willy Georg (b. 1911), German soldier and photographer who took pictures in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Muenster, Germany, Georg served as a radio operator in the German army during World War II. An accomplished photographer, Georg supplemented his income by taking pictures of his fellow soldiers with his Leica camera. In the summer of 1941 when his unit was stationed in Warsaw, Georg was issued a pass by one of his officers and instructed to enter the enclosed ghetto and bring back photos of what he saw. Georg shot four rolls of film and began to shoot a fifth when he was stopped by a detachment of German police. Failing to check his pockets for finished rolls of film, the police confiscated only the film in his camera before escorting him out of the ghetto. Georg developed the four rolls of film himself at a lab in Warsaw and sent them home to his wife in Muenster. He kept the existence of these photographs to himself for the next fifty years. In the late 1980s or early 90s, Georg met Rafael Scharf, a Polish Jew from London working in the field of Polish-Jewish studies, and gave him his Warsaw ghetto photographs. Scharf then published a selection of these photographs in his "In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941," Aperture, 1993.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: Rafael Scharf
 
Record last modified: 2004-12-30 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1077740