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Night photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto on fire

The slides of night photographs of the burning ghetto in the Museum's collection were taken by Zbigniew Borowczyk.

He was a photographer from Warsaw. Before the war he had completed a photography course organised in Poznań by Franciszek Greger, and when in 1939 a branch of the Foto-Greger company (the largest photographic trading company in Poland at that time) was opened in Warsaw on Nowy Świat Street, Borowczyk was hired at the shop.

During the war he also worked there, and it was probably where he developed his private films, including slides of the burning ghetto (hence the German frame). He owned high-quality equipment, which explains the quality of these colour photographs and their state of preservation (the Foto-Greger company was a pioneer in colour photography in Poland).

The historical photographs of the ghetto were taken at night from the roof of the building where he lived on the top floor with his wife, Helena née Szulczyńska, his son Edward, and his mother, Kazimiera.

Borowczyk also took photographs during the Warsaw Uprising; unfortunately, these have not been preserved.

During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he had his equipment and photographs walled up in a tenement cellar, thanks to which some of the photos survived. He got them out in 1945 when he found out that private visits to Warsaw were no longer prohibited. The Borowczyk family lived outside Warsaw at the time: after Borowczyk managed (he was fluent in German) to get her out of the Pruszków camp, they lived for a year in Zakopane and later in Katowice. In 1950, they returned to Warsaw. The slides were kept by their son, Edward Borowczyk, who gave them to an acquaintance, Halina Kobyłecka. She wanted to support the memorabilia collection programme of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Przemysław Kaniecki

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