In 2023 the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, Poland, presented an annual program titled Thou Shalt Not Be Indifferent: 80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A central element of the program was a temporary exhibition, Around Us a Sea of Fire: The Fate of Jewish Civilians During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The exhibition concept was developed by Professor Barbara Engelking, head of the Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and curated by Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The show was co-organized with the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the Center for Holocaust Research.
© Warsaw Convention Bureau Database
In early December 2022, after decades of obscurity, a roll of photographic film surfaced among family keepsakes. The film contained images made during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, who served as a firefighter with the Warsaw Fire Brigade during World War II. At the time the photos were taken, Grzywaczewski was 23 years old. German authorities had sent firefighters into the burning ghetto to prevent the flames from spreading to the so-called “Aryan” side of the city, and it was under those conditions that he photographed the scenes.
The pictures are frequently blurred, hurriedly composed from concealed vantage points and partially obscured by window frames, building walls, or figures in the foreground. Despite these imperfections, the images are invaluable: they are, as far as is known, the only photos taken inside the ghetto during the Uprising by someone who was not a German perpetrator.
© Ron Bernthal
Curators spent several months searching for the negatives. Maciej Grzywaczewski, the photographer’s son, was asked to review his father’s archive and ultimately found the negatives in the last box he examined.
The roll holds 48 exposures, of which 33 show scenes from the ghetto. Twelve of these images had been previously published as prints held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Jewish Historical Institute; the remainder had not been publicly displayed before. The newly revealed frames depict smoke hanging over the ghetto, smoke-filled streets and courtyards, burned-out buildings, firefighters battling flames, and brief moments of the men resting—posing on rooftops or eating from mess tins in the street. Many frames repeat motifs—the burning structures, the ghetto wall, and people being led to Umschlagplatz—suggesting the photographer was determined to document scenes not visible to those outside the ghetto fence.
The sequence captured on the negatives shows that the photographer entered the ghetto multiple times. Variations in light and weather across frames indicate images were taken at different times of day. Interspersed with the ghetto scenes are photographs of a walk in the park, offering a striking contrast to the devastation he recorded inside.
© Warsaw Convention Bureau Database
Grzywaczewski’s wartime diary suggests he spent nearly four weeks inside or on the edge of the ghetto, most likely between April 21 and May 15, 1943. He recorded harrowing observations in the diary, writing: “The image of these people being dragged out of there [out of the bunkers—ZSK] will stay with me for the rest of my life. Their faces […] with a deranged, absent look. […] figures staggering from hunger and dismay, filthy, ragged. Shot dead en masse; those still alive falling over the bodies of the ones who have already been annihilated.”
Although the diary does not mention photographing the ghetto, the discovery of the negatives among family keepsakes allowed his son Maciej and the exhibition’s curators to confirm Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski as the author of the images.
Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski was born on July 19, 1920, in Warsaw. He married Maria Magdalena Paprocka and had two children, daughter Dorota and son Maciej. From 1941 he served with the Warsaw Fire Brigade and pursued photography throughout the German occupation, documenting events including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was also a Home Army soldier and later fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
After the war he worked at a fire station in Katowice before studying shipbuilding at the Gdańsk Polytechnic. He went on to work for the Polish Registry of Shipping and the Maritime Institute, and was active in the Association of Friends of the Maritime Museum. His published works include titles on ships, firefighting on vessels, and recollections of firefighters who took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski died in Gdańsk on August 28, 1993.