The images, captured in secret by a 23-year-old Polish firefighter, Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, offer a rare civilian perspective on one of World War II’s most tragic chapters.
The film, titled 33 Images from the Ghetto, centres on a rediscovered roll of film and the personal diaries of Grzywaczewski, who witnessed the 1943 uprising as a member of the Warsaw Fire Service.
His son, Maciej Grzywaczewski, produced the documentary after finding the long-forgotten negatives hidden in the family home.
The younger Grzywaczewski said he was urged to search through his father’s archive by curator Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz, who was preparing a Holocaust exhibition at Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
"We were cleaning up after my father died, and we noticed the floorboards were loose. That’s where we found his journals,” Maciej Grzywaczewski recalls in the film.
The crucial negatives turned up much later, in the last box he opened, tucked away in the attic of his sister's house.
Zbigniew Grzywaczewski’s journal describes how German forces used fire to suppress the Jewish resistance and banned Polish firefighters from extinguishing the blazes.
"We were only allowed to protect buildings used by the Germans and to keep the fires from spreading to other parts of the city," he wrote.
He describes witnessing horrifying scenes, including people leaping from windows to avoid being burned alive, and Jewish civilians being marched to the Umschlagplatz site near the intersection of Żelazna and Nowolipie Streets, which served as the holding area from which they were deported to concentration camps.
Using a borrowed camera, the young firefighter secretly documented what he saw, often shooting through closed windows to avoid detection.
One of his photographs shows Jews being led to the Umschlagplatz.
'I didn’t believe the negative still existed'
The rediscovered negatives confirmed that Zbigniew Grzywaczewski was the author of images already on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington—a fact that even his own family had not known.
"I didn’t believe the negative still existed,” his son said.
The film tells not only the story behind the photographs but also of a family history shaped by silence.
"That generation, the one that lived through the war and saw the Holocaust, they locked everything away inside. It was a trauma they didn’t speak about,” Maciej Grzywaczewski said.
The Grzywaczewski family had hidden a Jewish family, the Laks, in their apartment in Warsaw's Mokotów district during the war.
Letters from Hilary Laks to his daughter Romana, discovered alongside the firefighter’s diaries, add further emotional depth to the story.
Director and screenwriter Jan Czarlewski called the materials “very rich” and described the letters and diaries as "truly remarkable.”
Kasia Kieli, president of Warner Bros. Discovery in Poland and CEO of the TV network TVN, said the film tells a familiar story from an entirely new angle: "We’ve all heard and learned about this history, but this film tells it in a deeply personal way, through diaries, letters and the personal story of these photos."
The documentary was co-produced by MVM Media, TVN Warner Bros. Discovery, the Polish Film Institute, the City Culture Institute in Gdańsk, and the Gdańsk Film Fund.
It premiered on the Max streaming platform and is slated to be shown at major international film festivals.
'I spent my whole life trying to forget these events'
Dorota Eberhardt, vice president for programming and streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, recalled one especially poignant scene in which the main character—a 95-year-old survivor—reunited with the memories, said: "I spent my whole life trying to forget these events, and now you bring them back. But if there is any sense in remembering, it’s to make sure it never happens again."
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out on April 19, 1943 and lasted until May 16, was the first uprising in German Nazi-occupied Europe and the largest act of armed resistance by Jews in World War II.
It is estimated that about 13,000 insurgents died in the ghetto during the revolt.
The Warsaw Ghetto, established in April 1940, was the largest of the many ghettos which the Germans set up across Poland to isolate the Jewish population after invading the country in September 1939.
(rt/gs)
Source: tvn24.pl, dzieje.pl