the boy and I

the boy with his hands raised

As I men­tioned here on April 10, when I was in my early 20s, I tried to imag­ine the life of the boy with his hands raised being led from the War­saw Ghetto. I spent months with him, I kept his image before me daily. I looked into his eyes, and I tried to look through his eyes.

the boy with his hands raised being led out of the War­saw Ghetto

I have known this pho­to­graph nearly all my life. It is a pho­to­graph known to many oth­ers as well. I men­tioned in my ear­lier post that it was pos­si­ble that the boy may not have died in the Sho’a.

Since then, I have stud­ied the pho­to­graph more and some of the con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing it. Of par­tic­u­lar help was the book by Richard Raskin: A Child at Gun­point. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004. ISBN 87–7934-099–7. While it is pos­si­ble the boy may not have died in the Sho’a, Raskin’s book pretty thor­oughly proves that those who either claim to be the boy, or claim that he did sur­vive have lit­tle evi­dence to con­firm their stories.

The photo is so pow­er­ful that peo­ple seem to want to be that boy. Oth­ers have writ­ten poems (rather poor, in my esti­ma­tion) to him.

let’s get real

Why does Fis­chl call him “Pol­ish”… because he (Fis­chl) is Hun­gar­ian by birth? Why not call him “Jew­ish”? If he was sim­ply a “lit­tle Pol­ish boy” there would be no pho­to­graph. Take a good look at the orig­i­nal photo above. Is there a star on the boy’s coat? How many machine guns are pointed at him? (Of course, one is more than enough, but if Peter Fis­chl wants to write a poem about it he should per­ceive its details accu­rately first.) Along with the photo, this poem has taken on a life of its own; so much so that in order to make the photo match the poem, a “star” was “pho­to­shopped” onto the boy’s coat. I’ve brought the two images together here (the star on the boy’s coat appears at minute 1:57 — 2:09 in the video):

com­pare pho­tos of boy with “star” (circled)

There is no ques­tion that the pho­to­graph is pow­er­ful. It is pow­er­ful enough with­out being edited. Raskin exam­ines the pho­to­graph from a visual per­spec­tive. Unlike many pho­tos from the Sho’a this one does not make us avert our eyes because it is too har­row­ing. Nonethe­less, the scene it depicts is out­ra­geous: a young, unarmed, boy (among many oth­ers) is forced to sur­ren­der. A high num­ber of polar oppo­sites are depicted (in Raskin’s words):

• SS vs. Jews
• per­pe­tra­tors vs. victims
• mil­i­tary vs. civilians
• power vs. helplessness
• threat­en­ing hands on weapons vs. empty hands raised in surrender
• steel hel­mets vs. bare-headedness or soft caps
• smug­ness vs. fear
• secu­rity vs. doom
• men vs. women and children

Regard­ing the boy him­self, he stands alone in his own space. Addi­tion­ally, the boy’s face appears near the “Golden Sec­tion” or “Golden Ratio” of the pho­to­graph. It is an out­stand­ingly grip­ping photograph.

the boy with hands raised and the Golden Ratio

The photo is one of many, taken as the Nazis destroyed the War­saw Ghetto dur­ing the Upris­ing. It was part of illus­tra­tive mate­r­ial for what became known as “The Stroop Report”, named for Jür­gen Stroop, the com­man­der of the Ger­man forces respon­si­ble for liq­ui­dat­ing the Ghetto. (Stroop is the man in the hat, not hel­met, who is not obscured in the photo below.) While we do not know for cer­tain who the pho­tog­ra­phers for the report were, two names are closely asso­ci­ated with it: Albert Cusian and Franz Kon­rad. Either one of them might have been the one to take the photo of the lit­tle boy. The iden­tity of only one per­son in the photo of the lit­tle boy is known for cer­tain: the sol­dier stand­ing in the sun­light on the right side of the photo: Josef Blösche. Blösche appears in at least one other pho­to­graph from the liq­ui­da­tion of the Ghetto (in the photo below, once again, stand­ing on the far right).

Jür­gen Stroop directs the burn­ing of the Ghetto (in cen­ter, in hat, not hel­met, not obscured) while Josef Blösche (on the far right) watches

other pho­tos of the liquidation

A few other pho­tographs of the destruc­tion of the War­saw Ghetto have been used else­where. One with which I have had direct per­sonal involve­ment is cap­tioned in the Stroop Report “Heha­lutz women cap­tured with weapons”. Inter­est­ingly enough, we do not see any weapons in the photograph.

Heha­lutz women cap­tured with weapons; used on the cover of Davka, Vol. 1, No. 4, Sum­mer 1971

The pho­to­graph was used on the cover of Vol­ume 1, No. 4 of Davka (Sum­mer 1971) devoted to “The Jew­ish Woman”, the orig­i­nal locus of Rachel Adler’s arti­cle “The Jew Who Wasn’t There”. These women were def­i­nitely there. The cap­tion in the lower right cor­ner of the cover reads (inven­tively) “The women fight­ers of the Ghetto Ris­ing, after cap­ture, await their fate with res­o­lu­tion and dig­nity. In a moment shots will be fired.” The cover was also made into a poster that was dis­trib­uted around Los Ange­les. Copies of it still hang in some homes.

but I digress… Jür­gen Stroops words

While read­ing about the liq­ui­da­tion I came upon this tidbit:

After a care­ful review of the sit­u­a­tion, I decided to end the Grand Oper­a­tion on the evening of May six­teenth, 1943, at eight-fifteen in a suit­ably artis­tic man­ner — by blow­ing up the Great Syn­a­gogue near Tlo­macka Street. Krüger had sug­gested this finale dur­ing his War­saw visit, giv­ing Jesuiter plans pre­pared by his top engi­neers in Krakow, show­ing how and where to bore holes and place explo­sives. This oper­a­tion took ten days to prepare.

the great syn­a­gogue of War­saw at Tło­mackie street

[Jür­gen Stroop in Kaz­imierz Moczarski, Con­ver­sa­tions with an Exe­cu­tioner. Edited by Mar­i­ana Fiz­patrick (Engle­wood Clifs: Prentice-Hall, 1981; orgi. pub­lished in Pol­ish 1977), page 164.]

There are 53 pho­tographs in the Stroop Report. We don’t know whether the sequence in which they appear in the Report is chrono­log­i­cal or was set for “artis­tic” pur­poses. For sim­i­lar artis­tic pur­poses, I imag­ine that the pho­to­graph of the lit­tle boy was taken that very last day… May six­teenth, 1943.

May six­teenth, 1943

this is posted on May six­teenth, 2010

My par­ents were born and grew up in Cleve­land, Ohio. Their par­ents were immi­grants from Ukraine (actu­ally, pater­nal: Chernigov [Cherni­hiv] Pale of Set­tle­ment and mater­nal, some 450KM north, from “Snofsk” on the Dnieper), not far from Vitebsk. At the time they left for the U.S. more than one third of the local pop­u­la­tion of Cherni­hiv and half of Vitebsk was Jewish.

In Cleve­land, their fam­i­lies lived near Euclid Ave. and “the Kins­man Street­car”. My grand­par­ents were either athe­ists or (per­haps the mater­nal ones) agnos­tics. Both sets of grand­par­ents were involved in Jew­ish life. Hil­lel Hurvitz was active in the Yid­dish Work­ers’ Cho­rus. They cer­tainly would not have joined the Reform congregation.

The Tem­ple, Cleve­land, Ohio

Nonethe­less, we have always known that my par­ents were mar­ried in “the rabbi’s study at the Tem­ple” dur­ing sefi­rat haOmer. A “spe­cial dis­pen­sa­tion” was made because my father was in the army sta­tioned at Shep­pard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. Nei­ther of my sib­lings are aware of any pho­tos from the wed­ding itself. In fact, I don’t even remem­ber see­ing their ketubah.

Nathan Hurvitz & Faye Hurvitz as newlyweds

So, on May 16, 1943, at approx­i­mately the same time that Jür­gen Stroop declared the destruc­tion of the War­saw Ghetto as hav­ing been com­plete with the destruc­tion of the Reform Great Syn­a­gogue near Tlo­macka Street, at a Reform tem­ple approx­i­mately 4500 miles or 7000 kilo­me­ters away in the west, though I was not yet a glim­mer in my par­ents’ eyes (my sis­ter was born 10 months later, 3 years before me) my life was beginning.

Today, very lit­tle is as it was then. The area of the War­saw Ghetto was com­pletely razed by the Nazis.

from the Wikipedia: Ruins of War­saw Ghetto, smashed into the ground by Ger­man forces, accord­ing to Adolf Hitler‘s order, after sup­press­ing of the War­saw Ghetto Upris­ing in 1943. North-west view, left — the Krasiński‘s Gar­den and Swię­to­jer­ska street, photo taken in 1945

Almost noth­ing of the wartime rub­ble remains. Deb­bie and I had the oppor­tu­nity to visit War­saw dur­ing Pesach of 2006. We made a point of find­ing a bit of The Wall.

a remain­der of the wall enclos­ing the War­saw Ghetto

The res­i­dents of War­saw have built a new city and the area of the Great Syn­a­gogue near Tlo­macka Street is now known as Bank Square (the Blue Tower) Błęk­itny Wieżowiec.

yet, the boy lives on

As I men­tioned in my April 10th post­ing, I have used the image of the boy with his arms raised for my own pur­poses.

leaflet detail

I am hardly alone in this. Aside from the “poem” by Peter Fis­chl, Raskin reviews a num­ber of instances in which the image of the boy with raised hands appears in artis­tic and polit­i­cal works. Though I have been unable to find the film on YouTube, Raksin gives a very detailed (with stills) recon­struc­tion of the movie With Raised Hands (Pol­ish title: Z pod­nie­sionymi rekami) by Mitko Panov. The film won the Golden Palm Award for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in 1991. In Raskin’s words:

The film is pure fic­tion in the sense that the writer/director imag­ined what might have hap­pened when the pho­to­graph was taken.

From the stills and shot-by-shot recon­struc­tion avail­able in Raskin’s book, it is both very inven­tive and moving.

Other cre­ative works include the British tele­vi­sion show The Glit­ter­ing Prizes (the final episode) and the works of Samuel Bak. I can imag­ine that many Chris­tians would feel that these two images by Bak are an affront to their reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties. And, on many lev­els I agree. Nei­ther the boy, nor any of the mil­lions of Jews and oth­ers mur­dered by the Nazis died for anyone’s sins.

Samuel Bak paints the boy with hands raised

I under­stand and appre­ci­ate how Chris­tians might feel when a sacred image is used by oth­ers to express some­thing that they might not iden­tify with. And so I cat­e­gor­i­cally reject this attempt at “equiv­a­lence” when Israeli artist Alan Schech­ner uses the image and con­nects it with a young boy cap­tured dur­ing the Intifada in a video that has one boy, recur­sively, hold­ing the pho­to­graph of the other.

Alan Schechner’s transformations

a con­fu­sion of categories

I am not alone in oppos­ing Alan Schechner’s use of the image. But, I also dis­ap­prove of this use of the image because of what I sense is a creep­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of other events as “equiv­a­lent” to the liq­ui­da­tion of the War­saw Ghetto. This week, as I write this post, a but­ton is avail­able for auc­tion on eBay which iden­ti­fies the mas­sacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 with the destruc­tion of the War­saw Ghetto.

lapel but­ton com­par­ing War­saw Ghetto in 1942 with Beirut in 1982

These two events are of dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, and can­not be com­pared. At the same time, while we need to beware of our strength and be ever vig­i­lant of abuses, we also need to guard against such com­par­isons. And so…

The fol­low­ing but­ton also uses the image of the boy with his hands raised. I have never worn it, nor would I. It was pro­duced, prob­a­bly, some­time in the early 1970s by the Jew­ish Defense League in New York.

the boy with his hands raised (lapel button)

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jacket you no longer wear, or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lay­ing around that you do not feel emo­tion­ally attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. At some point they will all go to an appro­pri­ate museum. You can see all the but­tons shared to date.