Warsaw Ghetto boy

during the Grossaktion Warsaw Warsaw is the capital of Poland. Before the war, about 380,000 Jews lived there, about one-quarter of the population. Upon the German invasion in September 1939, Jews began to be subject to anti-Jewish laws. In 1941, they were forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto, which contained as many as 460,000 people in only 2.4% of the city's area. The official food ration was only 180 calories per person daily. Although being caught on the "Aryan" side of the city was an offense punishable by death, people survived by smuggling and running illegal workshops. One copy of the Stroop Report is held by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw. Another copy was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, although the photograph was not ultimately shown to the court. That copy is held by the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). == Photograph ==

The photograph was taken during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (between 19 April and 16 May) in the Warsaw Ghetto. An Internet forum discussion on the "Marki Commuter Railway" Association for Defending the Remnant of Warsaw cautiously identified the location as Nowolipie 34 from similarities in the architectural details, especially the downspout. These claims are discussed in a 2018 Polish-language book, Teraz ′43 (Now ′43), by Magdalena Kicińska and Marcin Dziedzic. The photographer was either Franz Konrad or a member of Propaganda Company 689. Albert Cusian, Erhard Josef Knoblach and Arthur Grimm served as photographers in Propaganda Company 689; Cusian may have claimed to have taken the photograph. On trial in Poland, Konrad claimed to have taken photographs during the uprising only so that he could complain about Stroop's brutality to Adolf Hitler. The court did not accept this claim. Convicted of personally murdering seven Jews and deporting a thousand others to death camps, Konrad was sentenced to death and executed in 1952. The photograph depicts a group of Jewish men, women and children who have been forced out of a bunker by armed German soldiers. The original caption was "Forcibly pulled out of bunkers" (). Most of the Jews are wearing ragged clothing and have few personal possessions. After being removed from the bunker, they were marched to the Umschlagplatz for deportation to an extermination camp. In the center of the photograph is a small boy wearing a newsboy cap and knee-length socks who appears six or seven years old. He holds his hands up in surrender as Josef Blösche holds a submachine gun pointing downwards in his direction. The photograph contains many opposites; as Richard Raskin put it: "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". According to Frédéric Rousseau, Stroop probably chose to include the photograph in the report because it showed his ability to overcome Judeo-Christian morality and attack innocent women and children. == Identification ==

The boy There are several individuals who have been claimed to be the boy in the photo, but his identity remains unclear. All of the proposed claimants' stories are inconsistent with the known facts about the photograph. The boy was probably younger than ten, because he was not wearing a Star of David armband. was born in Tel Aviv but his family returned to Poland before the war. He lived in hiding on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. Since he and his family had valid Palestinian visas, they fell into the Hotel Polski trap in which the Germans promised safe passage out of occupied Europe. Liberated by American troops at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, Nussbaum stated in 1982 that he had been arrested in front of the Hotel Polski on 13 July 1943 and forced to raise his arms as depicted. Although some Jewish organizations uncritically accepted this claim at the time it was made, it is not possible that Nussbaum was the boy in the photo. from Gdańsk by his sister, Hana Ichengrin. The same person was also identified as Harry-Haim Nieschawer. The only identification that is certain is that of Rottenführer Josef Blösche, the SS man aiming the MP 28 submachine gun at the boy. == Legacy ==

preserved in many digital reproductions.|upright=1.25 The New York Times published the picture on 26 December 1945 along with others from the Stroop Report, which had been entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Trial. On 27 December it reprinted the photograph, stating: The photograph was not well known until the 1970s, Use in artwork The image has been used in some controversial artwork juxtaposing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with the Second Intifada in Gaza, which some argue is tantamount to Holocaust trivialization. In The Legacy of Abused Children: from Poland to Palestine by British-Israeli artist Alan Schechner, a camera zooms in on the boy in the photo, who is holding a different photograph of a child in Gaza being carried by IDF soldiers. Schechner stated that he did not intend to compare the Holocaust with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but merely illustrate the suffering of children because of the cycle of violence in which trauma causes victims to become abusers. A different approach was used by Norman Finkelstein in a photo-essay titled "Deutschland über alles", also juxtaposing the Warsaw photograph with images of Palestinian suffering. The subtitle read in all caps: "the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany". The Holocaust survivor and artist Samuel Bak has created a series of more than a hundred paintings inspired by the photograph, as well as by his own experiences and the memory of a lost childhood friend. In these works, the boy's extended arms are often depicted with a crucifixion theme or with the boy seen as a part of an imagined monument. ==Copyright status==

Both NARA and IPN describe the image as in the public domain. However, in the 1990s Corbis Corporation acquired the photograph from Bettmann Archive and licensed three versions of it, charging commercial rates for its usage. continues to offer it for sale, providing a copy of it with a copyright claim watermark as a sample. ==See also==