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Killing of Jews at
Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. A woman is attempting to protect a child with her own
body just before they are fired on with rifles at close range.
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A wartime photograph showing a mother
and child shot in cold blood outside the village by a German SS soldier
is now considered, in the words of British journalist Robert Fisk, "one of
the most impressive and persuasive images of the Nazi Holocaust." It was
featured in numerous books, and at photo-exhibits both in Poland and Germany,
as "precious and terrible evidence" of "the Nazi cruelties in
Eastern Europe."
The photograph was originally sent
from the Eastern
Front to Nazi Germany, but intercepted at the Warsaw post office by members of the
Polish resistance, the Home Army, for Jerzy
Tomaszewski who documented Nazi war crimes for the Polish
government-in-exile. On the reverse, it was inscribed: "Ukraine
1942 - Judenaktion in Iwangorod" (English: Ukraine 1942 - Jewish
operation in Ivanhorod). The executioner appears to be standing over the body
of an already executed person. The gun barrels of other executioners are
visible at the left-hand edge of the photograph. In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, the popular German weekly Der Spiegel (Nr. 49/1964) published the
photograph along with a diatribe naming several angry readers claiming it to be
a fake generated by the Russians, although the most incriminating evidence came
from the official German records. Confronting a society with photographic
evidence of one's own personal experience of war is almost as old as
photography itself, wrote reporter-turned-historian Janina Struk, who discussed
this image in her Private Pictures: A Soldiers' Inside View of War. In
extreme situations the "possession of such private pictures could lead to
a court martial", and yet soldiers keep taking them.
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