A photograph of the humiliation of Jews by Nazi soldiers. [Łuków], 1942

A photograph of the humiliation of Jews by Nazi soldiers. [Łuków], 1942

A photograph of the humiliation of Jews by Nazi soldiers. It is commonly accepted that it was taken in Łuków near Lublin, or in Tarnów near Kraków, during the early period of the German occupation of Poland. Autumn, 1942. A rare documentation of a public anti-Semitic humiliation carried out by the Germans.

This was an event of humiliation of Jews who had been taken out of the synagogue. In the photograph, a Jew is seen bent over another Jew. It should be noted that he is not kneeling on the ground; he is bent over another Jew after being forced to do so as an act of humiliation by the Nazis known as “riding a horse.” At the Yad Vashem Museum, this photograph is described as: “German soldiers humiliating a Jew wrapped in a tallit, apparently in the autumn of 1942.” According to the Yad Vashem archives, two individuals identified the humiliated Jew, each with a different identity. Martin Sept, a Holocaust survivor living in New York, identified the figure as Isaac Wrobel (son of Shlomo Zlata), who had taught him to read from the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah. This information was conveyed by Professor Zvi Ankori, Wrobel’s son and a native of Tarnów. According to an article published in the Holocaust Remembrance Day issue of Yedioth Ahronoth on April 12, 2010, the man crouching in the foreground is Ber (Dov) Ehrlich Sloshny, the maternal grandfather of former Mossad head Meir Dagan. One of the officers who took part in that act of humiliation was identified as Obersturmführer Otto von Mallotke, whose name is also mentioned in Chapter 16 of Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s List, in connection with Kraków and Płaszów. The military unit to which he belonged was: Reserve Police Battalion 101. His cruel actions can also be heard in the filmed testimony of Halina Nelken in Steven Spielberg’s documentation project.

In most cases, such humiliations preceded pogroms or transports to concentration and extermination camps. The soldiers would gather Jews, especially religious ones, and force them to perform degrading acts, sometimes accompanied by violence, and document this in photographs as part of a mechanism of dehumanization. It is not clear who took the photograph. According to various accounts, a local Polish youth found it and gave it to Jews who survived and returned to the town after the war.

Size: 11.5x8 cm. Light stains. Good condition.