Franz Blättler’s book Warschau 1942, described by Tomasz Szarota in the 1970s as the most valuable testimony of a foreigner from occupied Poland, was published in a small circulation in Zurich in 1945. For many years, only one edition was available. The main text was accompanied by around a dozen photos, although the publishers pointed out in the preface that the author had shared with them more materials than those included in the book. These have been unknown until now.

An ambulance driver’s testimony

As suggested by the subtitle: “Tatsachenbericht eines Motorfahrers der 2. schweizerischen Aerztemission 1942 in Polen”, the book is a testimony of a Swiss driver who arrived in occupied Poland with a medical mission in early 1942. He recounts the ten weeks he spent there, primarily in Warsaw (this is reflected in the structure of the book, divided into ten chapters). As early as the 1970s, Tomasz Szarota set out to find the diarist to gather material for a Polish publication. Hard as he tried for many years, his efforts proved futile. As it transpired, he was facing more hurdles than the apparent challenges in international communication, additionally complicated by the fact that the book’s publisher, F.G. Mich, has since ceased to exist. It eventually turned out that the surname “Blättler” was a pseudonym. Many years later, Szarota managed to identify the author. It was Franz Mawick, who had passed away in the 1960s. The historian reached out to his family, who granted him permission to work on a Polish edition of the diaries. He edited the volume and had it published.

Warszawa 1942. Zapiski szofera szwajcarskiej misji lekarskiej was released in 1982. The publication included relatively few photos, exclusively reproductions of those published in the Zurich edition – the Polish editors believed the original iconographic material to have been lost. Szarota mentioned this fact briefly in the introduction to the Polish edition: “As it transpires from the wife’s account, Mawick experienced a shock during his stay in occupied Poland. Even several years later, he would occasionally have nightmares, wake up in the middle of the night, struggle with falling asleep. It is also hardly surprising that he was reluctant to talk about the time spent in Warsaw. He wanted to forget about it. He would destroy his notes and, regrettably, photos, only some of which were included in the published book. It is a great, irrecoverable loss.”

It seems, however, that at least a part of this shocking material has survived, preserved in Helmy Spethmann’s collection.

Spethmann was a German nurse who stayed in Warsaw in the same period as Mawick (and she must have known him – Mawick recounts several times how he met with various nurses, and he would visit military hospitals to have his dressings changed). The original prints were donated to POLIN Museum by the nurse’s sister, Ingelene Rodewald, who had earlier published them in the book Zeugin des Grauens. Helmy Spethmann und ihre Fotografien aus dem Warschauer Ghetto (A Witness to Cruelty. Helmy Spethmann and Her Photos from the Warsaw Ghetto, 2014). When working on the publication, Rodewald erroneously attributed all of the photos from the collection to her aunt. She also had no resources to properly contextualise the photos taken in the cemetery (we may assume they were taken by Franz Mawick). The pictures are all the more valuable as a visual companion to Mawick’s account, aligned with subsequent fragments of his recollections from the pre-burial house and the cemetery. Naturally, the text itself also benefits from having the true-life story supplemented by a narrative conveyed through images, intrinsically linked to the description of subsequent steps and observation.

Once you become aware of the circumstances in which the photos were taken, you start to notice in several of the prints that the photographer is quite literally taken on a tour by Jews, that he is being guided through subsequent circles of the world of the dead. The Jews are showing this world to him, opening hearses, picking up bodies, going through the ropes in their routine, only occasionally giving the photographer a telling look. Without this context, we cannot tell how the Jews felt about the photos being taken – we may even be led to believe that they were being coerced.

(Many of the illustrations presented below are cropped. For ethical reasons, this catalogue does not include images of dead bodies.)

Let us quote an excerpt from Mawick’s account of one winter visit (of two) at the Jewish cemetery. He describes the first contact, relating how he managed to win over the encountered Jew, at first distrustful of him:

“A relatively well-dressed civilian comes up to me, with a Jewish band on the arm and a Star of David on the cap. He introduces himself as a Jewish policeman. He asks in fluent German what I am after. I am still within sight of the German guard, and I state with prominent Swiss accent that I would like to see the cemetery. I point at my cap with a Swiss cross, give him a piercing look, and say: ‘Swiss, Red Cross’. I feel like the man’s demeanour immediately changes. The two words seem to work magic. He is no longer stand-offish; he puts his guard down and tells me to follow him. In the courtyard, I see lots of wheelbarrows. Lying on them are bodies of men, women, and children, shoddily piled up, most of them naked, terribly emaciated, covered in boils and wounds” (pp. 63, 64).

In the published book, the photos accompany relevant fragments of the text. This part of the publication includes seven photos, each coming with short captions except for one, which bears a longer, several sentence-long description. It begins as follows: “The Jew who had collected the bodies pictured in the photo thus described the cause of death of the people lying on the cart […]” (p. 69). The man in the photo is standing still, looking at the camera. The fact that he agreed to be photographed next to the bodies he presented and commented on reinforces the veracity of his testimony, metaphorically signs off on it.

Therefore, once the viewer becomes aware of the circumstances surrounding the photos from Helmy Spethmann’s collection, their perception changes radically. The Jews captured in the images knew the Swiss man’s intentions or intuited them, so we perceive their eye contact with the camera as sanctioning his documentary efforts. In some photos, their permissive attitude is particularly striking, verging almost on eagerness to be photographed. The Jews assist the author in the documentation process, some help him carry out the “macabre inspection”, as Mawick calls it, shaken to the core. This extraordinary aspect, the care given to the photographer and active participation in his activity, had not shined through until the images were aligned with the verbal narrative. Only now do we understand what hid behind the Jewish subjects’ looks. They become even more telling if we juxtapose them with something said by one of those Jews, as cited in the book: 

“‘As a Swiss, can I ask you some questions?’ He looks at me carefully and replies in a serious tone: ‘Why not? Sooner or later, I will be lying in the exact same spot as those people you saw earlier’” (p. 68). 

In mentioning his statement – such a striking explanation of why he agrees to show the photographer around without hesitation – we need to add that the Jewish man concomitantly fulfils the Torah commandment to bear witness to evil, mentioned among others in the Book of Leviticus (5:1). As emphasized by Jacek Leociak in his discussion of the activity of historians working for the Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, this commandment underlies the entirety of Jewish historiography (see Archiwum Ringelbluma. Antologia, Biblioteka Narodowa Series, Wrocław 2019, Introduction, p. LXX).

If we didn’t know that the photos were taken by someone wearing a hat with the Red Cross sign – which is why Mawick was permitted to take photos in the first place – the cemetery collection would be highly ethically dubious. You could even go as far as to consider the circumstances surrounding the production of the images abusive (for a broader discussion of the ethical concerns around the modern use of photos from the Holocaust, see e.g. Susan A. Crane, “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography”, History and Theory 2008, no. 3). 

A nurse’s collection

We can only guess how Franz Mawick’s photos ended up in possession of nurse Helmy Spethmann.

The German woman was in occupied Warsaw in the same period as the ambulance driver, but her stay was a bit longer, lasting from the spring of 1941 to the fall of next year. She worked at Reservelazarett III (on 6 Sierpnia Street, today’s Nowowiejska). Unfortunately, we do not have access to any original source materials on Spethmann, all we know derives from the account of her niece, aforementioned Ingelene Rodewald. It is, notably, a polar opposite of the case of curators from the Museum of Warsaw, who received a wealth of materials concerning another German nurse who stayed in Warsaw in the same period. Donated to the Museum of Warsaw were not just photos – entire albums, may we add – but also other documents of Rosemarie von Blanquet (married name Lincke) which make it possible to reconstruct the beliefs she held at the time, discover the context in which certain photos were taken, and much more. The von Blanquet (Lincke) collection has been studied from many different perspectives, and curator Katarzyna Adamska published its detailed description with its many aspects in the Widok magazine (no. 41 of 2025). In the case of Spethmann, there are many things we simply do not know, and we have to resort to educated guesses. We develop hypotheses, but we cannot verify them without access to materials which would give us a broader context. And questions keep mounting.

We may wonder whether some of the photos from the ghetto were taken by Mawick when he was driving an ambulance in the seventh week of his stay in Warsaw (as mentioned in the chapter of the book describing this period). However, his authorship seems unlikely – and not only because the photos were most likely produced later in the year (although it is hard to roughly date all the images). Another argument against it is that none of the photos in the group depict the horrifying reality of the ghetto, which is the main focus of Mawick’s testimony. In fact, his entire account revolves around it and doesn’t really discuss much else (he and his companion found it all “unbearable”, p. 160). While moving nonetheless, the photos of ghetto streets found in Spethmann’s collection do not show the horrific scenes which Mawick witnessed and described (e.g. throwing dead bodies out of houses into the streets, people tearing clothes off corpses); neither do they picture any of the specific events which particularly shocked him, as described in his account of travelling through the ghetto.

The photographic sequence from the cemetery and the text of the book are a different case altogether. They are very closely linked to each other: what we see in the photos corresponds to what we read (it is a bright day in otherwise harsh winter, and subsequent visited places check out: the pre-burial house, the piles of bodies, the cemetery in the Skra stadium).

The entire collection of twenty-three prints should therefore be divided into two parts: eight photos from ghetto streets and fifteen photos from the cemetery. The two parts differ not only in their theme but also the colour of the photographic paper: the one used for the eight prints has a yellow hue (it is hard to establish whether it was like this from the beginning, or whether the prints simply yellowed with time). Almost all the prints have captions on the reverse, each handwritten by the same person – presumably Helmy Spethmann. Tellingly, however, the captions on the street photos are written in black pen (on four prints, the rest does not have any text on the back), and those on the cemetery photos (all of them) – in blue pen. This means that the two groups were not given captions at the same time.

One of the cemetery prints has a detail that gives us pause (namely the photo of a pile of bodies which has been published in the book, meaning it was certainly taken by Mawick). It bears visible traces of two holes – not made in the print itself, but in the negative from which it had been developed. This means that the same film has been used several times. The holes were made so that the negative could be stored and used to develop more prints. Mawick immediately knew that he needed to give testimony of what he had seen in Warsaw, to make as many people aware as possible (he started writing the book soon after returning to Switzerland and sought to have it published, but he did not manage to do so before the end of the war). Making photo prints was the first step in the project of sharing his testimony. We may therefore assume that the ambulance driver developed the film while still in Poland and gave some of the prints to the nurse or other people before returning to Switzerland. He probably decided to leave some of the photos with people he trusted and not bring all of them with him for fear of a border control. 

We cannot be certain whether Spethmann received the photos – either prints or negatives – from Mawick or from the people with whom he had left them. However, had they circulated within a larger group of people, for example fellow nurses, Rosemarie von Blanquet would probably also have them, and yet they are absent from her albums. Perhaps Mawick only gave the photos to Spethmann as the person he trusted the most, noticing that her worldview aligned with his and that she had not been bitten by the bug of Nazi ideology? Once again, it is regrettable that we cannot verify this hypothesis based on other sources (this is how Katarzyna Adamska was able to work on the article cited above, for example when analysing the language used by Rosemarie von Blanquet). In any case, the presumption that the driver handed over the photos directly to the nurse finds partial confirmation in the captions on the reverses – they match perfectly with what we see in the photos (the only questionable element is that the date given is March 1942 – perhaps it was an error made when the prints changed hands, or maybe the date is actually correct and Mawick did make a visit to the ghetto in that period but failed to mention it in his text).

The photos within the two groups vary in dimensions, which suggests they were developed in several stages. The edges are toothed on some prints and smooth on others. Some photos are developed on paper without any watermarks, others bear company marks (the street photos, at least some of them, are developed on Agfa-Brovira paper, while most of the cemetery photos – on Agfa-Lupex paper). Some prints bear notes from the photographic studio handwritten in pencil, others made with a numbering stamp.* Do these disparities in physical properties raise any doubts concerning the authorship, suggesting that Spethmann took the photos from the first group and Mawick those from the second group? This is hardly a conclusive factor, because we may simply assume that the photographic testimony was developed in several copies to be circulated among a trusted circle. To reiterate: the photos in both groups are thematically cohesive – in fact, they are pieces of a coherent narrative, subsequent snapshots of a certain event – in one case, a commute on a tram (one or several rides), and in the other case, an onlooker watching people unloading dead bodies from a hearse and walking through a cemetery.

What do the photos contribute?

We should be cautious not to overstate the collection’s documentary value. In truth, photos from neither of the two groups give us any fresh, groundbreaking insights. Even Tomasz Szarota – forty years ago, no less – showed little enthusiasm when discussing the value of the prints as a documentary resource, or, for that matter, of Mawick’s book in general (a book whose publication he had very much supported since the 1970s): “It certainly does not reveal any new, hitherto unknown details, but it does give us an account from an outsider witness, a very genuine one at that. The photos, too, […] are not unique in any way, but they are yet another piece of evidence of the committed crime.” 

Therefore, the basic documentary value of the collection is that both groups of photos enrich the broad image of the Holocaust. Each new shot is important, even if researchers already have thousands of others at their disposal. The discovered photos start to interact with already known pictures, as well as with information from archival documents or preserved mail, memoirs, diaries – held in the collections of various institutions in Poland and abroad as well as of POLIN Museum itself (whose holdings are quite impressive, given that they have been collected since fairly recently).

As a result, the photos complement other visual representations of the Warsaw ghetto and source texts, sometimes offering much needed detail. To give an example, one of the images showing the hearse (seen cropped above) – or rather the text visible on the hearse – has made it possible to determine the addresses of three hitherto unknown branches of Pinkiert’s funeral parlour: 32 Grzybowska Street, 26 Zamenhofa Street, and 27 Smocza Street. The photo of the gate in Nalewki Street, known from an image captured in 1940 (before the ghetto was sealed off: see Antologia spojrzeń. Getto warszawskie – fotografie i filmy, eds. Anna Duńczyk-Szulc and Agnieszka Kajczyk, publ. Jewish Historical Institute, Warszawa 2023, photo no. 41, from the collection of the Archives of Modern Records), shows barriers which were in use in early 1942, after the gate had been once again moved to this spot. Another photo, one of those taken at the Skra stadium, shows the burial of a Jewish man in a tallit. Apart from being a record of this particular victim’s death and carrying great emotional load – which are, naturally, its most important aspects – the photo also holds certain value as a representation of how the Jewish quarter functioned. The tallit is particularly striking if we take into account the high death rates and the material conditions of the society in that period. The beginnings of 1942 were a time when cemeteries were quickly filling up, even if people were only buried in mass graves. The deceased were stripped naked, as any piece of clothing was invaluable. And yet, the photo shows an individual burial with several undertakers – which means that it cost the family a pretty penny – and the dead man is being buried in ritual clothing. At this point in the ghetto’s existence, there were very few funerals in which religious rules were followed so rigidly.

In addition, the photo is one in a series of shots forming the panorama of the Skra stadium. The venue had been used as a crop field earlier in the war, but as early as November 1941 Adam Czerniaków, Head of the Judenrat – due to the exorbitant death rates in the ghetto – decided to change its purpose and convert it into a burial site before the coming winter (see Adama Czerniakowa dziennik getta warszawskiego. 6 IX 1939 – 23 VII 1942, ed. Marian Fuks, PWN 1983, p. 227). The Skra premises – together with the buildings in Okopowa Street visible in the background – have also been captured in other archival photos (see Antologia spojrzeń…, photo no. 59, from the collection of the National Institute of Remembrance), but only Franz Mawick’s pictures show the wall which still stretched between the Skra stadium and the cemetery proper, despite the former having been “incorporated” into the latter (the wall is also visible in the photo of a man with a cart full of bodies discussed above; interestingly, the Jew showing Mawick around in early spring notes that people started to plant potatoes again at the site of mass graves (see ibid., pp. 65, 68). 

One of the most significant dimensions of the collection, however, is the motif of Jewish looks mentioned in this essay. The hitherto unknown photos enrich Mawick’s account by giving us more insights into its co-authors. In this respect, we may consider the images not only documents of inflicted evil but also portraits of people who guided the Swiss man and explained to him – and, by extension, to the whole world – what it was he was seeing. Portraits of people to whom he gave a voice. Although they are anonymous in his testimony, their looks in the photos preserve their individuality and give them agency.

Przemysław Kaniecki