Early life Born Julia Diament in
Końskowola, a town in
Congress Poland, she was one of three children – a sister, Mindla Maria Diament and a brother, Majer Diament. She and her siblings were
self-taught due to their inability to attend school due to the then-political atmosphere. Diament and her sister were members of the
Communist Party of Poland – hostile to the system of the new
Polish state, which gained independence after 123 years of
partition. She and her sister were persecuted due to their support for communism in Poland after
Polish–Soviet War in 1919–1921.
Emigration In 1925 she was imprisoned for communist activities. Threatened by another arrest, she emigrated to Belgium in 1934 where she married Jean Pirotte, a labor activist in Brussels, and studied photography. In May 1940, after the German occupation of Belgium and the deportation of her husband, Pirotte made her way to southern France, where she played an active role in Jewish and French resistance groups. Based in Marseille, she worked as a photojournalist for
Dimanche Illustré and served as a courier for weapons, false papers and underground publications in a resistance group, the
FTP-MOI. During this time she took numerous photographs documenting life under the
Vichy Regime. As a member of the
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, she was able to photograph the activities of the
Maquis resistance in the summer of 1944 and the liberation of Marseille. After the war, Pirotte returned to Poland as a photojournalist for the Polish periodical
Zolnierz Polski. During that period she covered the aftermath of the
Kielce Pogrom of 4 July 1946 and attended the
World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace of 1948 in Wrocław, taking portraits of
Pablo Picasso,
Irène Joliot-Curie and
Dominique Desanti. Pirotte visited Israel in 1957. She later married Jefim Sokolski, a Polish economist who died in 1974. Pirotte's sister Mindla Maria Diament (1911 – 24 August 1944) was a member of the
French Resistance, she was captured and tortured before being deported and executed in
Breslau.
Legacy In later years, Pirotte frequently traveled to Belgium, France, and the United States, where, in 1984, the
International Center of Photography in New York hosted an exhibition of her work. After the war, she received decorations: The
Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 which distinguishes individuals (civilian and military), units, cities or institutions that received a commendation for acts of war during the Second World War and
the Order of Arts and Letters in February 1996, whose rewards "persons who have distinguished themselves by their creation in the artistic or literary field or by the contribution they have made to the influence of the arts and letters in France and in the world". In 2025, her life was the subject of the documentary film
You Have Courage, Madame (directed by
Asaf Galay). The film follows two contemporary photographers retracing Pirotte's journey and incorporates her personal testimony regarding her activities during World War II. == Personal life ==