The museum's historians said that the value of Grzywaczewski's pictures lies in their being the only known images from the ghetto uprising that were not taken by the German forces, and which therefore were not shot with the intention of serving Nazi propaganda.

Super interesting! Thanks for sharing!

TIL the uprising fighters held out for nearly a month

They held out longer than some German invaded countries. Really impressive

Shows both the tenacity of the Polish defenders and how nightmarish urban combat is

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hell, they created submachinegun factories in cellars in that time.

So there is no way to see the other 17 photos unless we go to the museum exhibit?

I think it was mostly Jews who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

I am not asking this to discredit the images or challenge their veracity but looking at them after spending a few weeks playing around with AI image generators…how do we know nowadays if something is a real “historic” image?

They are physical negatives from the 1940s

Good overall intellectual question but curious why, out of any myriad number of reddit posts with pictures and videos, that this specific set of photos are the ones that made you raise the question of veracity?

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Polish-Jewish defenders, then. Their nationality was Polish.

Ok. I was just pointing out that both the Poles and the Nazis emphasized that distinction.

At present such historical photos would be impossible to fake since the AI can't get uniform or weapon details right that an expert would know about.

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The Warsaw Uprising Museum was one of the best, and darkest, museums ive ever been to.

Most Poles did no such thing.

Not the same uprising. Blyskawica was created for the city-wide one. Both were ridiculously under-supplied in arms, but the ghetto one had almost no arms at all. Relatively speaking. If they actually had arms they would have had a chance.

Less than 100 years ago. Within living memory.

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Because the first photo I saw in the article without people looked similar to pictures I’ve autogenerated. I’ve mostly been generating prompts like “archival scanned military photograph 1942 Bavaria leaked photograph photorealistic [etc…convoluted phrases]” and it often generates black & white photographs that I imagine if done with more iterations and intentional keywords look like this. This also was what showed up on my feed. I literally say I am not challenging the photos in this post, I am curious. It could have been a picture of anything & I would’ve commented the same. Holy hell people read into things looking at the downvotes. Isn’t this a legitimate question we should be asking nowadays? You’ve seen all the UAP news. With as many fakes coming out about contemporary things now I wonder about how we will trust historical images.

Thank you for actually answering my question instead of downvoting me because you are reading between the lines. This is what I wanted to know.

Do you think AI will be able to do this soon though? Or a combo of AI & photoshop could trick most people right? How could one be sure? Is there any forensic photographic test that can be done?

Ya, I don’t mean the real physical negatives. I mean digital representations of them.

I haven’t done it yet, but now I will - copy a description of one of the images and put it in an ai image gen + “photographic negative 1940’s archival scan hyper-realistic aged military dust” or something along those lines. If the image doesn’t have people in it I bet one can make a pretty convincing digital image of a physical negative.

this is obviously going to be an issue in the future, so I dunno why people are so upset I’m asking

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Hey France held out for a month and a half, thank you very much

There are a lot of Holocaust deniers in the world. It may not have been your intention, but you effectively came into a thread about the Holocaust, saying “how do we know these pictures are real?”. You shouldn’t be surprised that people were put off by your question.

History shows they did the right thing. Saved a ton of lives and put up strategic resistance that was essential. I also don't care for France but not because of ww2.

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> History shows they did the right thing.

Active mass collaboration with genocide is not the right thing.

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Their nationality was Jewish. Their first language would have been Yiddish. Their citizenship was polish.

Exactly. We've found 20 photos never before seen! Oh, and here's 3 of them!

According to one source i read, Vichy actually saved a lot of jews by losing them in the bureaucracy. "Honest, Herr Kommisar, we put them on a train to Berlin, i just can't seem to find the paperwork at the moment".

That is a very well written article. It deserves a post in itself

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Do you think Poland in the 40s was not extremely anti-semitic?

Well, they may not have wanted to, but they sure participated.

Around 80% of the Jews arrested and sent to their deaths in France weren’t arrested by Germans, they were arrested by the French.

But ask any French person and they were all la resistance.

Pfft.

Without any data on either side; that sounds like revisionist history to make France seem less complicit.

If there's a prevailing sentiment for many years and then you start seeing "maybe surrendering so quickly was smart" "maybe the Vichy were undermining the nazis from within" just seems like changing the narrative. Like what we started seeing with the confederates 60 years after the Civil War.

Even if some Vichy officials helped some jews escape, i bet they still harmed many more jews than they helped.

Poland is historically one of the least anti-semitic nations in Europe. They’ve had a sizable integrated population of Polish-Jewish people for many hundreds of years straight

Poland was extremely anti semitic in the 40s and refused to allow their deported jews back to their homes from Siberia and the camps after ww2.

According to wikipedia, there were 3000 jews in Poland in 2010, hardly a sizeable population.

Yes, because a lot of them died during the holocaust…

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And the ones that survived were not welcome back, because Poland didn't like their jews either.

There are more jews today in Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, hungary...

"And the ones that survived were not welcome back, because Poland" was under soviet occupation for the next ~50 years

>did the right thing

some French people did the right thing. France turned over more Jews per capita than Germany ever did. The overwhelming majority of the French police, military, and government took to the Vichy regime without much complaint.

Poland had a population of around 3.5 million Jews before WW2, of those around 90% were wiped out by the Nazis. If it was as antisemitic as you seem to think it was, that population would have never grown so large.

Now unfortunately, right after one antisemitic regime was toppled, a second replaced it. The cult of Stalin, the Soviets. Communist Poland was a puppet state that was forced into carrying out Stalin’s policies, a lot of which were incredibly anti semitic. However that regime also eventually fell, leaving modern Poland to govern itself.

There isn’t a huge population of Jews anymore because of the tragedies during the 20th century, a lot of people don’t immigrate to Poland Jewish or not, so it’s not surprising the population hasn’t risen. People are far more likely to leave Poland instead

Poles didn't surrender. It was a lost cause and many died but the next invader will know it won't be easy.

It was not Vichy as a whole but more people working in the administration etc..

Pétain didn't care about jews, he just not want to be seen deporting french people. So foreign jews were given without a blink from Pétain.

70,000 children from jewish families were hidden by french people, you can imagine how many people needs to be kept in secret and not tell anything to the authorities.

There were 350,000 jewish people on French territory in 1940, 100,000 of them were "foreign" jews that were not born French. France deported 75,000 of them (2,000 survived), mostly "foreign jews".

75% of jews in France survived though, including 70,000 hidden children.

It's true that France before 1943 was still struggling to act as if the French Police (essentially in the northern part of France officially "occupied" area where Vichy didn't have much control) was still in control, so they were responsible to arrest jews (they literally asked for it to the germans). There was no really way to know what would become of them though, jews didn't really know either. Quota asked by the germans were never fulfilled though. Lots of french policemen could help some families still pretending to arrest, some policemen just did as asked. Even in places like the Vel d'Hiv were jews where regrouped some people just "walk away" while policemen were looking the other way.

Things like "also arresting the children" was seen as they would go to work camps with families, people thought that if you keep families together with children it would mean they wouldn't kill everyone, why bother? That's all those subtle decisions and the dilution of responsibilities that makes things like shoah possible in the end.

Some people though understood exactly what the horror mean and did everything they can to hide / go out of camps.

1 million french soldiers were emprisonned in Germany and the germans used them as bargaining chips.

Numerous witness accounts of the poles hunting down Jews for the Germans though, even polish people who hid Jews never revealed it because they didn’t want the wrath from their own countrymen.

No one could go against the Germans!

Albania and Denmark and Sweden showed it could be done.

Interestingly Albania was the only European country to have more jews at the end of the war than when it began, how amazing is that!

That’s 72,000 Jews still murdered.

72,000 people, were rounded up and slaughtered like pigs.

Sweden, Denmark and Albania managed to save their Jews.

Your numbers sound good like this but they don’t account for the 72,000 rounded up and slaughtered.

Shall we talk about the political prisoners now? Resistance fighters that were murdered?

I wouldn’t care as much if France didn’t try and whitewash what they were involved with.

75% of jews on french territory survived

French didn't slaughtered those jews though nor asked to.

Vichy France was a racist dictatorial regime, that became a fascist one after 1943, people were bad.

France doesn't try to whitewash anything, French student learn everything about the collaboration, what Vichy France did, etc.. the horror in colonies, the racist state there, the racist state of Vichy.

No problem talking about resistance fighters murdered or political prisoners.

yes no one is denying that but the dilution of responsibilies make things happen it's not that french policemen went and killed everyone, they were sent to camps in Germany as far as they knew (after 1943 Germans were in charge for everything )

Okay, so lol - no. It was not.

We had this little thing that can amount to pretty much occupation by USSR called PRL, that next to no one will defend on the ground we "decided for ourselves".

Before war it had one of the biggest amount of Jewish citizenry in the world, and a lot of our bigger cities had pretty sizeable influence left behind by some. Łódź is one for example, lol.

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Yeah, we did. Just like with all the other nationalities. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, the second republic was incredibly diverse.

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And many French Generals thought Germany couldn't get past the Minot Line and didn't anticipate Big Bertha.

>Their nationality was Jewish.

Not true. Their ethnicity and religion were Jewish. Their nationality/citizenship were Polish. No one's nationality was 'Jewish' then.

"Some 750 young Jewish fighters armed with just pistols and other light
arms attacked a German force more than three times larger. In their last
testaments they said they knew they were doomed but wanted to die at a
time and place of their own choosing."
Incredible bravery and strength.
If anyone's unfamiliar with what happened, I'd encourage you to watch The Pianist. While it's not a documentary, it covers the early days before the war, through the war itself from the perspective of a young musician. It should really be required watching in schools these days.

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No, not all. Many jews from other occupied territories and even Germany had been transferred to the Ghetto already after prior purges made room.

Its all freaking depressing but its nice to know at least some got away thanks to Polish help.

>I also don't care for France but not because of ww2.

British people be like

The pianist did a decent job portraying this in the movie.

Is that really that crazy?

Seems odd to want to require historical fiction watching. Holocaust deniers would have a field day.

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Over a quarter of them were Polish, but something like 90% of those were not from Warzaw.

Intentionally? I've similarly heard that Austrian incompetence saved a lot of Jews.

Which conveniently takes credit for Algerian resistance.

75% escaped, and it's interesting that you present the non-Jewish Frenchmen as more French and important.

I'm not sure what you mean.

75% of jews in French territory (metropolitan france occupied by Germany), excluding the one in north african territory or colonies

With the advent of the Internet yes. History should not be reserved for the wealthy that can pay for the trip

I think they’re aiming that recommendation more to people that are open to the idea that the Holocaust happened

So museums should just give everything away for free? Who pays curators, restorators etc.? Ads from the internet?

Believing that the Allies would come, that they would have supplies and assistance. It never came.

The Russians waited until they had beaten each other to death and then entered. Took their heroes and executed them for being an example.

Meanwhile, Stalin ordered his forces to wait just outside Warsaw, with the deliberate intention of having any Polish nationalists liquidated, so they could just take over. Which they did.

Sounds like something the people who run the museum should figure out. Making an effort to keep up with the times is any business’s responsibility

Aka 99% of people on Earth

You are talking about Warsaw Uprising from Operation Tempest - not Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Soviets behaved like this while 'liberating' the whole of Poland. In the east they allowed Polish fighters to fight alongside them only to arrest them after Germans were pushed out.

The public, most museums are publicly supported. History and knowledge (to an extent) should not be reserved for the wealthy and privileged.

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You think you know what a nationality is, but you don’t.

Fewer and fewer living survivors every day. We need to make sure we educate the future generations.

In 1943 Germany had other issues. Easier to wait them out anyway.

I'd love if any historians could answer this: How accurate was the portrayal of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the Leon Uris novel Mila 18? I remember reading it in highschool and absolutely loving it.

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But Algeria was considered to be part of the Metropolitan at the time.

>So museums should just give everything away for free

He's not asking for the negatives. He just wants to see a picture of it.

Throughout the entire war they had "other issues" yet still saw fit to divert resources to annihilate Jews. Because one of the central aims of the German war was the extermination of the Jews

Wrong Warsaw Uprising. There were two of them.

yes northern part of Algeria but not with this statistics, Algeria was never occupied by Germans

There's also a fairly decent limited series made in 2001, Uprising that does a pretty decent fictionalized retelling.

ah, thank you for the correction

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Museums shouldn't take donations then and pretend to be charities if they are about profit maximization.

Museums and archives can be hilariously stingy about releasing high res scans of what they've found. Though it's possible these are just buried in some very technical obscure web portal for the museums work that I haven't found yet.

To be fair, scanning things in is expensive, boring, and extremely time consuming. The margins for historical archive work is almost always in the negative.

Or they want you to ask and they will be happy to show you, in person.

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True, but the photos are almost certainly out of copyright and it should be easy enough to access high res scans for remote projects if they exist.

Data ultimately doesn't exist if it's inaccessible.

I get raising the bar for accessing stuff, but it kills the casual research curiosity for a lot of people. When I scanned 17k pages of yearbooks and docs for a school with my book scanner, I could have charged for access like all those yearbook sites. Instead I just posted it all online for free in high res. I'm never going to recoup the time costs involved in digitizing it. Might as well make sure as many people can get to it as possible. To date nobody has ever done anything particularly research worthy with that content, but I've had dozens of curious old people contact me to say thanks for letting them explore their old long lost yearbooks from their home.

It was occupied by Vichy

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I love museums but they sometimes thrive on artificial scarcity. I often end up buying the book about an exhibit because that’s the only way I’ll be able to see the objects after it ends.

I think in a lot of cases they don’t have the rights to publish them online. But it’s still frustrating.

Res to invade the soviet Union are different to Res used to quell uprisings. The guys in Warsaw would have been there anyway

I KNOW it was not. I had family there that often discussed the subject. Sure there were racists like in any other country, but significantly smaller percentage that anywhere else in Europe. There is a reason why Polish names figure prominently here .

Just seems like asking for “they’re making us watch this fake movie because there aren’t any real ones”. Then that’ll lead people to finding Anne Frank’s sister on Good Morning Britain saying that the Soviet photos are fake. Then who knows?

After WW2 those decisions were made by the Soviet Union not the Polish “government.”

Do you not see the word “most” in my reply?

Addition to your apt observation, not correction :) Thank you for bringing up this often-forgotten topic.

I work in digitization at a major institution, specifically on film scanning (among other things). The position of literally everyone who works in this area (including curators especially) is that we should make everything freely available online. Like you say, data doesn't exist unless it's accessible. We feel great pride in making things freely available to the world.

The reason why in every case where we can't make something public is the copyright holder. Polish copyright law on photographs is similar to the US and elsewhere - retroactively applied to 70 years after the photographer's death (the copyright law previously would have put these in the public domain already, but the new law retroactively put these back in copyright).

The institution may own the negatives, but not the copyright - this is standard. So any use requires permission from the copyright holder. Many copyright holders (which often is the estate of the photographer who is no longer alive) are happy to have the images be digitized and available for the public to see, but others emphatically are not for a variety of reasons.

I have no particular knowledge of the situation here. It could very well be that it's the museum itself being stingy and wanting people to come see them in person. But it's not like institutions digitize things for you to see online because they don't want you to come in person. The number of people who are going to go to this museum specifically to see these images is extremely small - mainly niche researchers and historians. So I'm just speculating that it's likely or at least very possible the copyright holder (the son of the photographer it sounds like) is enforcing restrictions on it, because that is extremely common.

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While studying WWII in high school, there was a made-for-tv movie about the uprising which was the first time I had heard anything about it. I'm not sure who is all in it, but I know Hank Azaria is, and I know that it was really informative. I definitely recommend looking for it if anyone is interested.

That's super cool! I've digitized film as a hobby and for friends/family/small businesses, but not on that scale. I'm sure you love seeing all that old stuff come back to life in modern accessible formats too!

I (wrongly) assumed Poland wouldn't have as hardcore copyright laws as the US does, but yup, that's the case. That definitely makes sense though. You have to stay above board on who holds the rights even if it seems a little ridiculous at times.

It is extremely niche to researchers and historians. I know no museum is holding out with the hope that someone is going to come specifically for some random scanned images. People, even experts in the field, really don't care enough most of the time. Most archivists definitely would prefer to just throw it out (in an organized fashion of course haha) and let bygones be bygones.

Still, I've seen some places stay pretty overzealous on gatekeeping their archives. Random story, I worked for a university and their library had an enormously convoluted process to access their old, university specific, and mostly public domain photo archive. The people managing it are all in their 60s and 70s and would not budge that the super niche 120 year old photos MUST be protected. I worked in marketing and figured out which librarian to contact to have the lists of photo ID's sent over to me in high res when we needed some archival content. The rest of my coworkers just went to the index site, downloaded the low res preview with the watermark, and edited or cropped the watermark out. I couldn't convince them to just take the time to email the right person and get it in full quality, haha.

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The spirit of resistence, though, is dead

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Do you feel that way about school teaching Maus or Number the Stars since they're historical fiction depictions of the Holocaust?

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Mila 18 by Herman Wouk is great historical fiction about the uprising.

300 German soldiers were killed. Not exactly 'waiting them out.'

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Yes. Is there really a need to sensationalize the event?

That’s the number of resistance fighters that were killed. The German casualty number is 110, with 17 killed, 93 wounded officially, although there is a decent chance it is higher.

I don’t know how to check, but if the majority of their casualties came in the initial ambush, it’s still plausible they waited them out after that.

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Thats indeed valuable! They show how the firemen and other first responders would see the uprising. We can’t know his stance towards jews and the ghetto, but as you state - they weren’t taken for propaganda reasons.

Amazing

My grandparents escaped from Lithuania Nazi occupation..

That's a different uprising. There were two, the Ghetto Uprising in 1943, and Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Sonder Aktion 1005 from Germany own records shuts them up..

Poland fought both evil Nazi Germany and Soviet union..The only country to do so..

I may have misread the article but I think it said he and his family were risking their lives to hide Jews. So we can guess what his sympathies may have been.

Well, i have to admit that I wrote this slightly before reading the whole article. So yes, we know his stance, or his family’s stance.

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Fascists will always make bad-faith arguments no matter how perfect the evidence is against them. Better to heed them no mind and just teach good critical thinking skills.

Thanks for sharing

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I went to look it up, as it sounds like something I'd like to read. Could it be by Leon Uris? I didn't see a Herman Wouk version...

How - huh? How does historical fiction sensationalize an event? Well-written, well-researched HF can provide insight into the lives and experiences of those who didn't have a chance to tell their story. It shouldn't be used at the expense of factual and first-hand accounts, but it's a useful tool.

Edited to add: I also think historical fiction is extremely useful in elementary classroom settings. Depending on the era you're teaching, narrative nonfiction accounts might be scarce or nonexistent at that reading and maturity level. Telling the story of the event through the eyes of a character their age allows them to relate to the story and understand it. It's what made me fall in love with history as a child. Books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Steal Away Home and Fortune's Journey and all the diaries in the Dear America Series, the American Girl books, even my problematic-but-beloved Little House series - these are what introduced me to the specific realm of history I find most fascinating as an adult: the often mundane, day-to-day lives of ordinary girls and women who cooked and cleaned and taught school and got married and had relatable feelings and thoughts.

Hard disagree, it shouldn't be a business at all, museums should be public services and funded as such. It is in humanity's interest to make sure we don't forget the past.

In alot of cases the content is publicly owned and can't be copyrighted. Butthey will illegally claim copyright anyway.

> I love museums but they sometimes thrive on artificial scarcity.

they have so much in storage its crazy

The Poles did not, at the time, consider the Jews to be True Poles. Look at what happened to Jews who tried to return to their homes in Poland after the war to see an example. Plus, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were not all from Poland.

speaking of which, serependity is a thing, fresh as fresh goes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNoyjHwVCmQ

The pianist isnt fiction…

She never said they were fake

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Thank you! The other was '44.

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Thank you for that. Amazing! And a perfect complement to Ian’s Błyskawica one

It is Leon Uris, I have it on the shelf and it is as good as mentioned.

Maus is not fiction. Art Spiegelman told his parents’ story. Yes he used the allegory of cats and mice, but it doesn’t make it less true

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So how is that different from a historical fiction book on the exact same subject? Obviously Maus is an allegory, but they're both telling the same story of people experiencing the same event, with aspects fictionalized or changed for the purpose of storytelling.

As long as historical fiction is well-researched and respectful and accurate to the events and real-life figures depicted, and as long as it's correctly labeled and not presented as nonfiction, I can't see it as sensationalizing anything.

A final question - what about narrative nonfiction, something like The Killer Angels, where the events of the battle are meticulously detailed and all characters are actual historical figures but the dialogue is fictionalized because obviously we don't know everything that was actually said?