64 | JANUARY 26 • 2023 

F

or the last 80 years, 
the only way to see 
images of Jews rising 
up against their captors in the 
Warsaw Ghetto has been from 
the perspective of Germans, 
who took the only known 
photographs of the seminal 
event of Jewish resistance 
during the Holocaust.
But last month, a roll of 
film taken by a Warsaw 
firefighter during the uprising 
was discovered by his son. 
The developed pictures 
offer a previously unseen 
perspective on the Warsaw 
Ghetto Uprising, according to 
the POLIN Museum, which 
announced the find last week.
“The image on them is often 
blurred, recorded in a hurry, 
hidden, partially obscured 
by the elements of the 
immediate surroundings: the 
window frame, the wall of the 
building or standing figures 
of people,” the museum said 
in a statement. “The photos, 
however imperfect, are 
priceless.”
The pictures were 
taken by Zbigniew Leszek 

Grzywaczewski, a Warsaw 
firefighter whose brigade 
was tasked with making sure 
the fire in the ghetto did not 
spread to the “
Aryan” side of 
the city as the Nazis put down 
the Jewish revolt.
An estimated 13,000 Jews 
died during the uprising, 
which was carefully organized 
and took place over several 
weeks in April and May 1943, 
following the Nazis’ decision 
to “liquidate” the ghetto, 
Europe’s largest. Many of them 

died as a result of the fires.
“The sight of those 
people taken out of there 
will probably remain in my 
eyes for the rest of my life,” 
Grzywaczewski wrote in his 
diary in 1943. “Faces (…) with 
mad, unconscious eyes. (…) 
silhouettes staggering from 
hunger and terror, dirty, torn. 
Shot in masses, some alive 
fall over the corpses of others 
already liquidated.”
The POLIN museum, 
which opened on the 70th 

anniversary of the ghetto 
uprising 10 years ago to tell 
the history of Polish Jews, said 
the photographs suggest that 
Grzywaczewski understood 
the significance of what he 
was doing. The roll contained 
48 shots, 36 of which had 
never been seen before this 
month.
“These are the views of 
smoke over the ghetto, on its 
streets and backyards, burned-
out houses, firefighters putting 
out the fire, standing on the 
roof of the house and eating 
a meal from metal canteens 
in the street,” the museum 
said. “It seems that Leszek 
Grzywaczewski tried to record 
these scenes as best he could, 
realizing the importance 
of documenting the events 
inaccessible to the eyes of 
people on the other side of the 
ghetto wall.”
The differences in lighting 
between shots, as well as the 
inclusion of photographs of 
the Aryan side of the city 
interspersed among those 
of the ghetto, suggest that 
Grzywaczewski entered the 
ghetto multiple times with 
a camera, not just on one 
occasion.
The pictures were found by 
Grzywaczewski’s son, Maciej 
Grzywaczewski, who spent 
months looking through his 
father’s archive’s collection on 
the museum’s hunch that there 
may be something of value 
there.
The museum plans to 
display the pictures as part 
of an exhibition scheduled 
around the 80th anniversary 
of the uprising in April. 

WORLD

DAVID I. KLEIN JTA

MACIEK JAŹWIECKI / POLIN MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF POLISH JEWS

LEFT: Negatives from 
photographs of the 
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 
are handled at the POLIN 
Museum in Warsaw.

FAMILY ARCHIVE OF MACIEJ GRZYWACZEWSKI, SON OF LESZEK 
GRZYWACZEWSKI / PHOTO FROM THE NEGATIVE: POLIN MUSEUM

A photograph of Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising 
there, taken by the photographer Z. L. Grzywaczewski.

A never-before-seen perspective 
A never-before-seen perspective 

on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

New Images 
 
 
 Discovered 
 in Poland

