This is a black-and-white photograph taken by Jozef Seweryn of Jews being rounded up by Nazi soldiers in the early 1940s in Krakow, Poland. In the centre of the photograph is a wood-panelled truck with people, presumably Jews, standing in the back; armed German soldiers, dressed in winter uniforms, are surrounding the truck. The truck is driving past what appears to be a large church. The city of Krakow, covered in snow, can be seen in the background.
Jozef Seweryn was in his mid-twenties when he took this photograph. A keen photographer who always carried his camera, Seweryn was hiding at the time in a coffin in the window of his Polish friend’s funeral parlour and took this photograph through a knothole in the coffin. Seweryn was in the Krakow ghetto until he ran away in October 1942. He explained his escape in the oral history recorded by Centropa:
"On my own I discovered an underground passage, running through houses which were connected to the ghetto. Nobody knew about this passage but me. Before the war I had a girlfriend, a Pole; her name was Jadwiga Lepka and she worked in a bookstore. I ran away to her. I had to get Aryan papers. A priest agreed to give me a fake certificate of baptism, issued for Jozef Seweryn. Seweryn was the last name of my mother’s husband (a Polish Catholic). All his children were Seweryns and I became a Seweryn as well. I looked right, and I was taken for an Aryan. By the end of 1942 I married Jadwiga."
Seweryn went back to the ghetto several times to help Jews. In November 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo because he was seen with two Jews. He was masquerading as a Polish Catholic at the time, so although he was sent to Auschwitz, he was registered as a Pole. (He later asked Yad Vashem to correct the mistake and to have him recorded as a Jew.) Seweryn survived several camps and, after the war, managed to return to his wife in Krakow. He later served as a witness in the trials of war criminals.
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Jewish Community of Krakow – Krakow is the second largest city in Poland and was one of the important Jewish centers in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Jews began living in Krakow in the fourteenth century and established themselves in the Kaimierz on the outskirts of the town, where they built a mikveh (ritual bathhouse) and a cemetery. Despite frequent conflicts with their non-Jewish neighbours, the Jewish population grew, and by the middle of the 1800s, Jews were allowed to settle in the city of Krakow itself. At this time, secular, assimilated Jews became the leaders of the community, although religious Jews also lived in the city. By 1900, over 25,000 Jews were living in Krakow, growing to 60,000 by the onset of World War II. The Germans occupied Krakow in 1939 and a ghetto was established in 1941. The ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, and the Jews were sent to the death camps at Auschwitz and Belzec and the slave labour camp Plazow. As depicted in the famous film Schindler's List, the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jews in his factory that was situated in Krakow. After the war, 2,000 Jews returned to Krakow. Today, approximately 1,000 Jews live in Krakow, although only about 200 are affiliated with the organized Jewish community. Of the many synagogues that were in Krakow, only seven survived the war. Three are still active, include the famous Rema Synagogue. The community also has a Jewish community centre and a Jewish kindergarten. Krakow has hosted a popular annual Jewish festival since 1990.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
