More than 100 photographs taken by a German soldier in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 went on exhibition at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center here Monday.
The exhibition, titled “A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto — A Birthday Trip Into Hell” was opened by Education Minister Yitzhak Navon on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The pictures were taken by Heinz Joest, a hotelier and amateur photographer who was stationed at a German army camp near Warsaw.
The “birthday trip” referred to in the title was Joest’s birthday in 1941 when, as he told the West German magazine Stern years later, he first ventured inside the ghetto to find out what was going on behind its walls.
He recorded the sights in 129 photographs which are starkly horrifying and empathetic. Stern reported that Joest was so deeply shocked that he told no one of his experience. “I didn’t want to upset my family. I thought what sort of world is this?” the ex-Wehrmacht soldier was quoted as saying.
Joest gave his pictures to Stern two years before he died in the early 1980s. The magazine never published them, but gave them to the Yad Vashem archives last year.
They depict hunger, beggars, the indignities heaped on the dead. The photos are displayed here according to subject matter: children, street life and burial pits. Accompanying the exhibit are sections from the “Warsaw Diary” of Chaim Kaplan, an eyewitness account of what the Jews in the ghetto endured.
Navon left for Poland Tuesday with a delegation of some 1,200 Israelis, who will commemorate the 1943 uprising on the site of the ghetto. The group includes seven Knesset members and 600 teen-agers, some of whom were awarded the trip in a nationwide quiz on the Holocaust.
The trip is the first by Israeli officials to Poland since that country severed diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967. They are traveling as individuals and, while not guests of the state, are expected to meet with members of the Polish government.
Some 4,000 Jews from 20 countries are also expected to attend the ceremonies in Warsaw.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
