Looking at the ghettos

The invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked the beginning of World War II. In the territories annexed to the East, the German army gathers the Jewish inhabitants in ghettos very quickly overcrowded and unsanitary. First stage of the genocidal process of the Jewish population of central Europe, the ghettos are liquidated in 1942-1943 and their population led to the killing centers.

The process of extermination set up in the greatest secrecy by the Nazi authorities is in this first stage paradoxically well documented visually: between 15,000 and 20,000 photographs were taken in ghettos during the Second World War.

What are these images? Propaganda? Testimony? Resistance? Denunciation for history?

The answers are partly given by the context of their realization and the personalities of their authors.

Through a selection of little-known photographs from collections preserved around the world, taken in different ghettos (apart from large ghettos such as Warsaw, Lodz or Kaunas, more than 400 other ghettos existed) The exhibition offers an analytical and historical reading of the photographs and, through them, retraces a history of what was the imprisonment and slow death of several hundred thousand Jews in ghettos.

See the exhibition website