In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Photographs by Heinrich Jost

Rating:
Summary: A critically important and compelling document
Review: During World War II, Heinrich Jost was a sergeant in the German Army stationed near Warsaw, Poland when he became curious about the corpses he had seen lying along the walls of the Jewish Ghetto. An amateur photographer, Heinrich took his Rolleiflex camera into the Ghetto in September 1941 (unaware of the situation that awaited him there) and spontaneously shot several rolls of film taking pictures of street vendors and corpse carriers, dying children and well-dressed women. He had no inkling that his photographs would become a vital document of the history of the Ghetto and the dire circumstances of its Jewish population brought about by implementation of the Nazi holocaust. Heinrich kept his prints hidden for decades without showing them to anyone. Then in 1982, he personally handed the photographs over to Gunther Schwarberg, then a reporter for the German magazine "Stern". Schwarberg gave the photographs to the Jerusalem Documentation Center Yad Vashem, where they were exhibited in the spring of 1988 and then sent on exhibition around the world. In The Ghetto Of Warsaw is the first time that Heinrich Jost's photographs have been published in their entirety along with his impressions and recollections as recounted to Gunther Schwarberg along side each picture. An essential addition to any personal, academic, or community library Holocaust studies collection, In The Ghetto Of Warsaw is a critically important and compelling document of both the ghetto and the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Rating:
Summary: A critically important and compelling document
Review: During World War II, Heinrich Jost was a sergeant in the German Army stationed near Warsaw, Poland when he became curious about the corpses he had seen lying along the walls of the Jewish Ghetto. An amateur photographer, Heinrich took his Rolleiflex camera into the Ghetto in September 1941 (unaware of the situation that awaited him there) and spontaneously shot several rolls of film taking pictures of street vendors and corpse carriers, dying children and well-dressed women. He had no inkling that his photographs would become a vital document of the history of the Ghetto and the dire circumstances of its Jewish population brought about by implementation of the Nazi holocaust. Heinrich kept his prints hidden for decades without showing them to anyone. Then in 1982, he personally handed the photographs over to Gunther Schwarberg, then a reporter for the German magazine "Stern". Schwarberg gave the photographs to the Jerusalem Documentation Center Yad Vashem, where they were exhibited in the spring of 1988 and then sent on exhibition around the world. In The Ghetto Of Warsaw is the first time that Heinrich Jost's photographs have been published in their entirety along with his impressions and recollections as recounted to Gunther Schwarberg along side each picture. An essential addition to any personal, academic, or community library Holocaust studies collection, In The Ghetto Of Warsaw is a critically important and compelling document of both the ghetto and the atrocities of the Third Reich.