3. Bryan’s film Siege (Pathé Films, 1940) lost the Oscar that year for short subjects on a technicality: the film had not been released to general audiences at the time of its nomination. For a discussion of Bryan’s contributions to photojournalism and documentary cinematography, see “Everyone Would Believe My Pictures: The Legacy of Julien Bryan,” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/bryan (accessed November 20, 2010).
One of Bryan’s most famous and moving images of the Polish campaign portrays ten-year-old Kazimiera Kostewicz,4 who, in the presence of the photographer and his Polish guides, discovered the body of her elder sister, killed in a strafing run by German pilots. Bryan’s photograph and accompanying postwar commentary capture the cruelty of a war waged against civilians and of a child’s first experience of death.
4. Kazimiera Mika (née Kostewicz, 1929–) survived the war and was reunited with Julian Bryan when he returned to Warsaw in 1959. Mika recently joined the cinematographer’s son Sam Bryan at the seventieth-anniversary screening of Siege in Poland in 2009.
Document 2-1. Ten-year-old Kazimiera Kostewicz (Mika) discovers the body of her sister Anna, killed in a strafing run by German pilots on Polish civilians near Warsaw, September 1939, USHMMPA WS# 50898, courtesy of Julien Bryan.
Document 2-2. Julien Bryan, Warsaw: 1939 Siege, 1959 Warsaw Revisited (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1959), 20–21.
Bodies are not pleasant sights under any circumstances, and when they are of young women, torn to pieces by bombs and sometimes without heads or arms or legs, they are horrible to behold. In photography we ordinarily think of beauty of composition. There was no beauty here. But it was true: women and children had been killed by enemy bombs. I was not making a travelogue. I was in Warsaw, whether I liked it or not, making a historical record on film of what happens in modern war. People might not believe my story if I told it in words when I returned to America. Everyone would believe my pictures. [. . .]
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.
While I was photographing the bodies, a little ten-year-old girl came running up and stood transfixed by one of the dead. The woman was her older sister. The child had never before seen death and couldn’t understand why her sister would not speak to her.
“What has happened?” she cried. Then she leaned down and touched the dead girl’s face, and drew back in horror.
“Oh, my beautiful sister!” she wailed. “What have they done to you? You are so ugly!” Then, after a few seconds: “Please talk to me! Please, oh, please! What will become of me without you!”
The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me.
What could we, or anyone else, say to this child?
As the first battles of World War II raged in Poland, German citizens too were coming to terms with the early ramifications of the new conflict. German Jews, already marginalized and persecuted in the early years of the Third Reich, now found living in Nazi Germany even more precarious. Among them was seventeen-year-old Inge Deutschkron. An award-winning writer and journalist in the postwar, she survived the war years in Berlin as a “U-boat,”5 a Jew living “underground,” often under a fictive name or on false papers. Her father, a Gymnasium6 teacher and staunch Social Democrat, lost his post in 1933, when the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned both Jews and “politically unreliable” elements from civil service posts. In 1939, Martin Deutschkron managed to flee to London, but Inge and her mother were prevented from joining him when World War II in Europe commenced on September 1 of that year. A flurry of anti-Jewish legislation in the wake of Kristallnacht had already curtailed Jewish life in social and economic spheres. With the outbreak of war, a new rash of decrees and regulations further limited Jews’ ability to function within German society.7 Jewish citizens were severely limited in their movements, especially in public places. Food and clothing were strictly rationed. Inge Deutschkron recalled the anxiety and frustration of Jewish existence in those early war days, before Nazi antisemitic policies drove her and her mother “underground.”8
5. The German is U-Boot, meaning “submarine.” For a discussion of Jews living underground in Berlin during the war years, see Leonard Gross, The Last Jews in Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); Inge Deutschkron, Berlin Jews Underground, trans. Hanna Silver (Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 1990).
6. This is a German school providing secondary education in preparation for college study, much like college-preparatory high schools in the United States.
7. See Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, esp. 245ff.
8. Deutschkron (1922–) began writing as the German correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in 1958 and in 1966 became an Israeli citizen. She later settled in Berlin, where she remained active as a writer; in 2008, Deutschkron won the prestigious Carl von Ossietzky Prize for contemporary history and politics.
Document 2-3. Inge Deutschkron, Ich trug den gelben Stern, 4th ed. (1975; Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1983), 60–67 (translated from the German).
In the months following [the outbreak of war], Jews were the subjects of a multitude of decrees and ordinances, in order, so it was said, to hinder “subversive activities.” Jews had to give up their radios. Their telephone lines were disconnected. Between 8:00 p.m. (9:00 p.m. in summer) and 5:00 a.m., Jews were not allowed to leave their residences. They had to remain in their air raid bunkers until the all-clear signal was blown, so that they could not give any lighted signals to the enemy. All protections for Jewish renters were lifted. Jews had to give up their furs, binoculars, cameras, electrical appliances. [. . .] In the end, Jews were not allowed to visit theaters or concert halls or cinemas. Parks and public spaces were closed to them. Even sitting on a bench once meant for Jews and marked with a yellow star was forbidden. Certain areas of Berlin were declared off-limits to Jews: the government district was one of them.9
9. This refers to the traditional district encompassing government buildings, most lining the Wilhelm-Strasse below Unter den Linden in the central Tiergarten district of Berlin.
Naturally, it can be ascribed to my youth that, unruffled, I declared to my mother that I would not even think of adhering to these regulations. I needed to visit the theater once in a while; I needed music or a walk in the Grunewald.10 I couldn’t endure the narrowness of Jewish society, which had now been turned in upon itself. Their conversations now revolved around all the aggravating things that the Nazis had already decreed or those things that we could expect from them in the future. Fear and depressive foreboding resonated from these discussions. People tormented themselves: “I have heard from a reliable friend who has it directly from the propaganda ministry that the Nazis are planning this and that.” Then this passed [. . .] from house to house and frightened and plagued the people, who were already so anxious. [. . .]
10. This large and picturesque forest in the Charlottenburg-Wilhelmsdorfer neighborhood of Berlin later became a deportation site for the Jews of Berlin.
The Jewish populati
on of Berlin had almost without exception all that they needed that their limited ration cards deprived them of. Their fellow citizens in Berlin saw to that. First of all there were the owners of the grocery stores who put aside their “extras” for their faithful old customers. My mother and I went once each week to Richard Junghans, a former Social Democrat and friend of my father’s, who opened a grocery store at the “Knie” (today Ernst-Reuter-Platz) after he lost his post with the union in 1933. He furnished us with fruits and vegetables as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do so. It was the same with our butcher Krachudel, who had his stand at the weekly market on the Wittenbergplatz, where my mother had shopped for the last fifteen years. Now he gave my mother the same amount of meat that our family had requested for years, without our having to give up one single ration card. [. . .]
On April 1, 1939, my school years ended. That did not happen voluntarily. The Nazis closed the Jewish schools.11 [. . .] We girls celebrated our “graduation” in our own way, by dancing with each other. [. . .] Dance class, which at this time was customary for well-bred girls, was of course not available for Jewish students. Even meeting with young people of the same age was rarely possible. The fear of being recognized by some Nazi in a café or park and abused deprived these moments of flirtation of any pleasure. [. . .]
11. Most segregated Jewish schools were officially closed on July 7, 1942.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Nazis blocked my father’s pension fund with the justification that he lived in an enemy country, and so we had no right to the money. We had to cut back our spending, although at that time we couldn’t spend much money. The sale of food supplies was restricted. Jews didn’t receive ration cards for textiles. We moved into a more modest room in the Hansaviertel.12 [. . .] Constantly the radio intoned, “Because we’re marching, because we’re marching, because we’re marching on England,” and “Today Germany belongs to us, and tomorrow, the world.”13 For us Jews it was eerie. We were filled with fear. What would happen if Hitler, against expectations, won the war? Little Frau Oppenheimer, whose husband was once a lawyer and was a friend of my father, said to my mother in a conversation on the street, “We will not live through that. For us there would be no survival.” It is difficult to say where she got the courage to say out loud what none of us knew, what we did not want to believe. Shortly before the outbreak of war, she had sent her thirteen-year-old son to England. Later, in the midst of the deportations, the Oppenheimers took their own lives—true to their motto, “Us they won’t get.”
12. This refers to a small quarter in central Berlin near the Tiergarten.
13. Both phrases are lines from Nazi wartime propaganda songs.
As Wehrmacht forces expanded the boundaries of the German Reich and those regions under its military and civilian control, German authorities transferred various tenets of antisemitic legislation to areas under their jurisdiction. In Austria (the Ostmark) and in German-annexed areas of Czechoslovakia (the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) and Poland, German officials simply extended those regulations concerning racial policy to these territories as they were incorporated into the Greater German Reich. In the Generalgouvernement (General Government)—those parts of occupied Poland not directly annexed to Germany—Governor General Hans Frank issued a string of anti-Jewish ordinances in the late autumn of 1939, ordering the clear designation of Jewish persons and Jewish-owned property and businesses, prohibiting Jews from moving their residences, restricting freedom of movement and travel without permit, and introducing forced labor. In most cases, those antisemitic regulations put in place in German-occupied Poland represented harsher and more repressive measures than those imposed in Germany or its annexed territories at the time. In other nations that Germany had defeated and in which it installed occupation administrations or quasi-independent puppet governments—as in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece—German authorities or their indigenous collaborators introduced legislation defining who within the population would be regarded as Jewish, usually based on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Parallel laws circumscribed Jews from that nation’s social, cultural, and economic life.14 This phenomenon also occurred in Axis countries allied to Germany, such as Hungary, Romania, and Italy, although Nazi German leaders could not control the internal policies of these nations and needed to exert varying degrees of pressure to persuade their allies to accede to their demands.
14. An exception to this pattern was Denmark, whose government steadfastly resisted the implementation of most antisemitic measures, including the imposition of the Jewish badge.
One of the most ubiquitous antisemitic measures employed in German- and Axis-controlled Europe was the mandatory wearing of the Jewish badge (yellow star). This effort to impose a distinctive mark upon the Jewish population marginalized its members and made them more vulnerable to official and spontaneous discriminatory actions. The measure affected both children and adults and varied in its essentials from region to region. The first such decrees requiring Jews to wear the Jewish badge appeared in occupied Poland in November 1939, where Hans Frank ordered that all Jews above the age of twelve living in the General Government must wear on the right sleeve of their outermost garment a white armband affixed with a blue Jewish star. Similar regulations, with various discrepancies in the badge’s appearance and the age of the wearer, materialized in other districts of Poland and in areas occupied by German forces following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.15
15. For a discussion of the designation of Jews in Germany and in German-occupied Europe, see Diemut Majer, “Non-Germans under the Third Reich”: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, trans. Peter Thomas Hill, Edward Vance Humphrey, and Brian Levin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003).
Twelve-year-old Idel Kozłowski experienced firsthand the series of restrictive decrees and regulations imposed by German authorities following the occupation of western Belorussia. Shortly after the arrival of German forces in June 1941, Jews in his hometown of Golshany were compelled to wear the Jewish star and confined to an enclosed area of the town that formed a small ghetto. To the youngster, it was immediately clear that the new measures rendered him and his fellow Jews vulnerable to the aggressions of their antisemitic neighbors and helpless in the face of Nazi persecution.
Document 2-4. Interview of Idel Kozłowski (Kozlovskij) by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, February 14, 1947, USHMM, RG-15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, Łód´z, 301/3626 (translated from the Russian).
Autobiography:
I, Idel Abramovič Kozlovskij,16 was born in 1929 in the small town of Golshany [Polish: Holszany; Yiddish: Olshan] in the Vilno oblast to a family of merchants. My father traded in linen cloth. Our family consisted of six persons. My father Abram Kozlovskij, my mother Masha Kozlovskaja. Two brothers: Ėlia and Isaak. My sister Chasia. From 1937 until 1939, I went to a Jewish school. In 1939, when the Germans conquered Poland, the Red Army took over our oblast, western Belorussia, as well as the western Ukraine and transferred it to the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. With the beginning of Soviet control [in the area], I went to the Jewish N.E.Š. [Novaja Evreskaja Škola, or New Jewish School]. These were the last happy days of my young and promising life. So my life went before 1941. [. . .]
16. The child’s name is spelled in two different ways in the interview protocol.
On June 23, 1941, the German marauders, in a breach of trust,17 invaded the USSR, and by June 24, 1941, they were already in our village. Already in those first days the Germans commenced their predatory and bloody deeds. From the scoundrels [Psy] within the Polish population, they assembled a police force that helped them to accomplish their rapacious deeds. Immediately, the Germans issued the order that fro
m now on Jews would not be considered equal citizens [under the law]. The Jews had to wear a white band with a large six-pointed star in the middle upon the arm.
17. The German army’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, violated the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939.
Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalk, only in the gutter. The police went to all the Jewish houses [and] beat, robbed and ridiculed everyone. Two months later, we were chased from our houses and driven into the “GHETTO”18—that is, into a section of the village that was fenced in with planks—and in that they drove all of us Jews. With our move to the ghetto, a new order decreed that Jews were forbidden to go outside the ghetto. The Jews had to wear a new kind of marking: a large, six-pointed star on the chest and back. Circumvention of this order was punished with shooting. [. . .] So we lived in this difficult, bloody situation and witnessed how these dogs—our enemies—lived in our houses, how they walked untroubled in the streets [while] we sat fenced in like cattle in the ghetto, awaiting death every day and without the possibility to [save] ourselves.
18. Capitals and quotation marks are present in the original.
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