Color Photos From The Warsaw Ghetto During The Holocaust

Colored photos from the Jewish Getto in Warsaw, Poland. The photos were taken by Willi Georg, who was a corporal and cameraman in the German army in Warsaw and entered the Warsaw ghetto on June 26, 1941. He shot four films on several main streets. The fifth film was confiscated from his camera without being searched and without the other films being discovered. Later on, he sent all the photos to his mother in Muenster, Germany.

 

The photos show a view on Zelazna Street in the Warsaw (Warszawa) ghetto. The deciphered signs read “ovens,” “ice cream,” “pens.” Rickshaws travel on the street to transport passengers.

 

The Jews in the photos were later sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp (one of the dozens of extermination camps) set up by the Germans in Poland. Only a few survived the horrors of the camp and the Nazi German murder industry.

Yossi Biran colored the photos. 

The photos were colored by Yossi Biran, an artist, and amateur historian. Yossi Biran finds the pictures in the archives and then improves the resolution and then color the images and bring them back to life.

Yossi, born and raised in Israel to a German descent mother and a father of Greek descent. His mother was a non-Jewish resident of Berlin who decided to immigrate to Israel and convert.

What motivated Yossi in his thorough work on the photos is the desire to bring the Holocaust to the younger generation’s awareness, to make them and others remember the Holocaust. The collection of photos also includes very harsh images of death that were an integral part of life in the ghetto.

Yossi chose to focus his work on life, on the people who were in the ghetto, and there is no doubt that the colorful pictures cause people to be exposed to them, to look more closely at the pictures, and to identify with the inconceivable suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust.