In a recent letter to the editor of Slavic Review, I took issue with the identification and interpretation of two photographs that appeared in an article titled “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising.” The scenes were mistakenly identified as taking place in wartime Warsaw. While various perspectives may be taken on how one uses and interprets photographs in other disciplines, as an historian, I believe it to be essential that a strict review of the photographs’ origin be examined since they may force us to come to different conclusions about the reality of historical events, and possibly perpetrators of crimes. The crux of my argument follows.

There is a consensus among scholars that a photograph, along with other visual evidence, falls into the category of primary sources and helps historians to reconstruct the past. An historian must conduct a process of evaluation on a photograph—as he/she would do with any other document—before utilizing it to describe and analyze past events. The photograph is a text, just as written documents are, and its evaluation can be based on the practice of source criticism, external and internal.Footnote ¹ Today, when the use of photo editing software prevails in the process of doctoring photographs, external criticism, the examination of a photo in order to learn if it is authentic, is as important as ever. If the image has been altered or the photo arranged or staged, its value for the historian may be different from that of a genuine camera shot, which in a Rankean sense, documents an event as it happened. The fact or facts that are documented by the image are given meaning by the historian through internal criticism, a practice that E. H. Carr called the processing process.Footnote ² This meaning comes into sharper focus when the photograph is accompanied by a caption and/or additional written description which places the image into an historical context. The various contexts into which a photograph can be placed over the years represents the history of the image, its afterlife.Footnote ³

As was noted in a recent NY Times essay, “Throughout the 20th century photography as proof, or documentation, of the physical world was a defining principle of the medium’s art-making practice.”Footnote ⁴ This holds true for some of the work of the wartime Soviet photojournalist, Evgenii Khaldei. In this exchange of comments I wish to call attention to two of his documentary photographs that have had noteworthy afterlives and which were misidentified, as I indicated earlier, in a previous article in Slavic Review. The first image depicts two dead women laid out on the sidewalk and behind them a grieving male sitting on the stoop of a door. The second image shows the fuselage and tail of a glider wedged into the top floor of an apartment house. Both of these photos were taken in Budapest during its siege that took place between December 25, 1944, and February 13, 1945.

The siege of Pest, on the left side of the Danube, ended January 18. It was on this last day that the so-called Large Ghetto was liberated by Soviet troops. Khaldei was among the first of the Soviet troops who entered the ghetto and took a series of photographs of the conditions he found there. As David Shneer pointed out in his essay and then in his monograph, the photograph of the dead women, along with four other ghetto photographs, two of them picturing survivors, first appeared in the Soviet Union in a Yiddish-language newspaper on March 3, 1945.Footnote ⁵ By then, three weeks after the end of the siege, the liberation of the ghetto was no longer news, but history. According to Shneer, the editors put the photographs into overlapping contexts as the “Jewish and Soviet story in one. & The Soviet role was as heroic liberators who saved Jews & from murder and destruction.”Footnote ⁶

As indicated by the background information that accompanied the photos in the Yiddish paper, the murderers of these Jews were the Germans: “Hitlerites drove tens of thousands of Jews from all over Hungary into the Budapest ghetto region.”Footnote ⁷ The description indicated that the commentators had only superficial understanding of recent Hungarian history. In fact, the ghetto housed mostly Budapest Jews, who had been forced to move there not by the Germans, but by the Hungarian authorities in November 1944 from the so-called “starred houses.” Following the June 1944 edict of the lord mayor, the Jewish inhabitants of Budapest were forced to move to and live in isolation in these two thousand buildings that were marked with the Star of David and were located in various parts of the city. By then most of the Jews outside the capital, numbering close to 430,000, were dead, having been deported between May 15 and July 9, 1944 by Hungarian administrators mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be exterminated by the SS. The Hungarian state’s complicity in the Holocaust, therefore, was not noted in the Yiddish paper and hence another context into which the photos could have been placed was overlooked.

The paper’s caption of the photo of the two murdered women was, “A mother and daughter whom the fascist dragged out from the cellar, beat in the middle of the street, and then shot. Next to them sits their husband and father.”Footnote ⁸ More about the history of the photograph was revealed fifty-one years later, in 1994, when the wartime photos of Khaldei were exhibited in Berlin. It is at this time that the Russian photographer provided one of the curators, Ernst Volland, the background of his pictures. His recollections were fortified by sixty notebooks that included commentaries written soon after the photos had been taken.Footnote ⁹ He offered the following explanation to the ghetto photo: “Just before the German retreat, I saw this scene in the ghetto. It was five o’clock in the morning. They went looking for this woman and her daughter and shot them in their night gowns. The husband was in hiding at that time. Returning home, this is what he saw. For what reason? I thought. The Germans, after everything, are retreating from Budapest. Why don’t they flee posthaste to save their skins? Why the atrocities? I could not do anything else but to commemorate that sight.”Footnote ¹⁰ This description was reprinted at a 1999 Khaldei exhibition in Tel Aviv where the photograph was exhibited with the title “Mother and Daughter Shot by the Germans, Budapest Ghetto, Hungary, 1945.”Footnote ¹¹ Khaldei’s attribution of the murder to the Germans was understandable, but inaccurate, and was repeated in other venues.

During the summer of 2005 the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris hosted the exhibit, “Evgenii Khaldei, Photographer of the Red Army.” The aforementioned photo was part of the show and can be accessed online. The bottom border of the picture bore the inked note, possibly penned by Khaldei, “Ghetto in Budapest.” The picture’s title given by the curators was factually imprecise, “A Mother and her Daughter Shot by the Germans. Budapest Ghetto, end of 1944.”Footnote ¹² The shooting did not take place in 1944, but in 1945, as was dated correctly at the Tel Aviv exhibit. In the photo titles shown at both exhibits, following Khaldei’s inferences, the Germans were identified incorrectly as the murderers. In fact, the killings in the ghetto were most probably committed by roving fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross gangs, and it is likely that the two women were shot six days before the ghetto’s liberation, when the last Arrow Cross massacre took place. Ironically, in response to repeated mass murders, it was the German commander of Pest who ordered German troops to the ghetto’s gates to protect the Jews from further Arrow Cross incursions into the area.Footnote ¹³ The photograph at the French exhibit was also accompanied by Khaldei’s 1994 recollection about the birth of the photo.Footnote ¹⁴ As indicated above, Khaldei’s account disclosed how he came to learn that the two murdered females were mother and daughter and the grieving male was the surviving father. The perpetrators of the crime, just as in the 1945 news article, were identified as being the German troops rather than their Hungarian satraps. Once Khaldei provided more details about the birth of the photo, it was he and not an unknown journalist of the Yiddish paper who perpetuated the wrong context in which the two women were seen as victims of the Germans.

The afterlife of the photo took a curious turn in 2014 when it came to represent rape committed by Soviet soldiers following the occupation of Hungary in 1945. In February 2014, the Central European University historian Andrea Pető, an authority on the history of rape during World War II, contributed an article to a topical issue of the Hungarian popular history journal, Rubicon. Pető’s article, “The Non-Narratable Memory. Rapes Committed by Soviet Soldiers in Hungary,” dealt with a taboo theme of the state socialist era.Footnote ¹⁵ In a similar article published a year later in the on-line journal Mandiner, she had a section subtitled “Is It Possible, or Rather, Is It Necessary to Depict Rape?” Accompanying the text was Khaldei’s mother and daughter photo, which she presented as an illustration of rape.

She recalled in the Mandiner article, that the historian Árpád Rácz, owner and editor in chief of Rubicon, already intended to use Khaldei’s photo as an illustration to her 2014 article and wanted to know if the dead “women” in the picture were raped and, if the answer was in the affirmative, could the photo be published with the article. Pető immediately turned down the request to include the picture—but not because she questioned whether the picture depicted a rape. Judging from her account, the photo was new to her and she was not aware that it was taken in the just liberated ghetto and that the murdered women were mother and daughter. Professor Pető misdated the picture to post-liberation—March or April 1945. It appears that the wrong dates led her to assume that the gruesome photo represented the night-gowned victims of rape. Even for her second article she seems to have done insufficient research about the history of the photo, otherwise she would not have written that since the publication of her article in Rubicon, “I am thinking why for decades nobody published this photo, when the Khaldei collection has been used by many and for various goals.”Footnote ¹⁶

Her objection to having the photo included in Rubicon was based on moral considerations. She wrote: “At that time I felt that because of the victims it would not be ethical to use the picture for my article.” Furthermore, summing up Susan Sontag’s position on the moral issue, Pető claimed that, “looking at a picture depicting rape recreates not only the visual culture of rape, but with the glance repeats the rape itself as one looks in awe at the picture. This is the argument, & that caused me to request Árpád Rácz, not to publish the photo in Rubicon.”Footnote ¹⁷

Pető’s article in Mandiner included not only the Khaldei picture, but also a 1945 photo of a raped and murdered woman in Vienna’s Prater Park who, according to the police report, was the likely victim of Soviet soldiers from a nearby barrack. The appearance of the photos in the essay indicates that since the publication of her article in Rubicon, Andrea Pető changed her mind about the feminist objection to photographic representation of rape victims. This time it was permissible, she wrote, because “we look at the photographs in a way that its meaning is expressed through the information gained over the passage of time since the rape was committed.”Footnote ¹⁸ In her revised position Pető may have been influenced by rereading Peter Burke who in his basic book on images noted that “testimonies about the past offered by images are of real value, supplementing as well as supporting the evidence of written documents. It is true that, especially in the case of the history of events, they often tell historians who are familiar with the documents essentially what they know already.”Footnote ¹⁹

Primary sources relating to the rape of Hungarian women by Soviet troops became available after the regime change in 1989. Collective memory, which had expressed only in whispers the horrors of rape committed by Russian soldiers late in 1944 and the first half of 1945, surfaced in a torrent following the departure of the Soviet occupiers. Historians who aim to understand the military’s systemic violence against women could possibly misread Khaldei’s photo as supporting evidence to written documentation, a visual representation of rape and murder by Soviet soldiers. Andrea Pető, who indicated in her article to have no thorough information about the origin of the Khaldei photo, fell into the trap of seeing evidence where there was none. What she learned from written sources led her to see in Khaldei’s photo something that was not there. Had she practiced a thorough source criticism she would have rejected the reading of the photo as a representation of rape. As a result of her misreading, the context of the photo shifted from the German murder of Jews and liberation, to rape by the Soviet victors.Footnote ²⁰ It meant a change from one wrong context to another.

In June 2015, the Khaldei photograph reappeared as an illustration of rape in the translated Hungarian version of Deborah Cornelius’s monograph, published in 2011 by Fordham University Press.Footnote ²¹ Cornelius’s goal was to put a positive spin on the role played by Hungary and its leader, Miklós Horthy, as Germany’s ally in World War II. In a damning review that appeared in Slavic Review, Ivan T. Berend wrote: “Hungary, unlike Germany, never really confronted this dark chapter in its past. Unfortunately, Deborah S. Cornelius’s reevaluation, rather than making a step in this direction, does just the opposite.”Footnote ²² Rubicon published the Hungarian translation and the monograph’s editor was Árpád Rácz, who added 160 wartime photographs to the book. The publication was subsidized by the cultural foundation of the right-wing Hungarian government, which is much interested in presenting itself as an heir to the officially whitewashed Horthy régime. Khaldei’s photograph appeared on the bottom of the page and above it the last lines of Cornelius’s narrative stated: “Rape was so common that few women were spared. The youngest victims were less than ten years old; the oldest over ninety. In Budapest alone it was estimated that 50,000 had been raped by Romanian and Red Army soldiers. The population was utterly defenseless.” Kheldei’s photograph, illustrating the text bore the caption: “Rape victims of the Soviet military at the beginning of 1945.”Footnote ²³

Unlike Andrea Pető, Árpád Rácz provides in his caption a better estimation of the date when the photo was taken. It is also very likely that he was even aware what the photo really represented. This can be surmised from the fact that that the sources of the published photos—except for the mother and daughter photo—are identified on the last page of the book. Here neither Khaldei nor the collection is identified. It seems that Rácz had a choice to publish the picture captioning the truth, that the women, mother and daughter, were the Jewish murder victims of marauding bands of the Hungarian Arrow Cross in the Budapest ghetto or go with a false testimony. Clearly, Rácz, taking the clue from the master narrative of the government, did not wish the readers of the monograph to confront “this dark chapter” in Hungary’s past. It is ironic that using Khaldei’s original comment about German responsibility for the murders would have already deflected Hungarian complicity; instead, Rácz shaped a false claim in the caption of the published photograph. As Pető indicated, already in 2014 Rácz had tried unsuccessfully to use the photo as an illustration to Pető’s article. A year later he inserted it in the translated monograph of an American scholar who raised no objection. Thus Khaldei’s photo in this instance continued to serve as a representation of rape by Soviet soldiers.

According to the post-structuralist canon, “any meaning attributed to an image is as valid as any other.”Footnote ²⁴ This approach would justify the Khaldei photo as an acceptable visual representation of rape. Empirical (or positivist), and even postmodern historians reject this view and stress the importance of source criticism in order to represent the past as precisely as possible.Footnote ²⁵ Clearly, for whatever reason, Rácz failed to follow the historical method, which according to Richard J. Evans, “is based on the rules of verification laid down by Ranke and elaborated in numerous ways since his time. It is common to all historians working in all these various theoretical modes, as a glance at their heavily footnoted works will easily show.”Footnote ²⁶

Most historians adhere in parts or fully to the methodological principles first set down by Ranke which can be applied also to the reading of documentary photographs of photojournalists. At the end of the nineteenth century visual artists led by Paul Cézanne came to believe, what later was reinforced by science, that seeing was a subjective process that permitted the viewer of an image to reconstruct it in his/her mind, thus participating in a creative experience.Footnote ²⁷ It is this concept that led to abstract art and to the agency of the artist to distort. Comic books represent a genre of literary and visual form through which a tale is being told by written text and distorted images. The artist of the comic book can invent an imagined story as well as engage in doing myth history and through it contribute to the shaping of collective memory.

In a recently published article in Slavic Review, Ewa Stańczyk examined the contemporary representations of child soldiers of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising through various media, including a comic book. The six-page comic book she analyzed was Kaczka by Jacek Frąś. For the illustrations she included images that appear on the last page of the comic book. On this page are photos of wartime urban landscapes and drawn on these the viewer can see the escaping child soldier cartoon characters of the story. In her narrative Stańczyk writes: “The last page shows images of the city in ruins, a powerful reminder of the material and human losses caused by the uprising.”Footnote ²⁸ These images were also described in a similar fashion in a 2010 essay by Dieter De Bruyn, whose analysis is mentioned by Stańczyk. De Bruyn wrote: “On the last page of the comics, the drawings depicting the escape gradually merge into real photographs of the ruined capital. &”Footnote ²⁹ Thus, both scholars label the pictures as photos taken of Warsaw in ruins. The problem with this context is that two of the photographs that Frąś used for the background for the escape of his cartoon characters are the Budapest photos of Khaldei!

The image that Ewa Stańczyk identifies as representing “human losses” is the Budapest ghetto photo of the murdered mother and daughter taken by Khaldei on January 18, 1945, while one of the images representing “material losses” is another Khaldei photo showing the fuselage and tail assembly of a German transport glider wedged into the top floor of an apartment house in the Buda side of the Hungarian capital.Footnote ³⁰ The building was near the encircled Castle Hill where German and Hungarian troops made their last stand in the capital against the Soviet army. The plane was carrying much needed munitions and food supplies to the besieged troops when it lost altitude and crashed into the building on February 5, 1945.Footnote ³¹ On February 13, the surviving defenders capitulated but the plane was not removed until November 1945. For this reason in addition to Khaldei, numerous other photographers captured the scene. The image became the iconic representation of the siege.Footnote ³²

No doubt both Ewa Stańczyk and Dieter De Bruyn had good intentions when they put the Khaldei photos into the context of the German response to the Warsaw uprising. It seems, however, that they, just as their Hungarian colleagues, were also unfamiliar with the origin of the pictures. Consequently they must have assumed that Jacek Frąś intended to make his tale more believable if the escaping cartoon characters were running past actual Warsaw city scenery. De Bruyn in his analysis of Kaczka points out that the first panel’s imitation photo with the cartoon characters “is rendered more truthful by an authentic Nazi stamp in the corner of the photo.”Footnote ³³ Could this technique of mixing the imaginary with the real have misled De Bruyn to assume that Frąś used genuine photos of Warsaw to make the escape of the four cartoon characters even more believable? For some reasons that the two authors may explain better, De Bruyn and then Ewa Stańczyk engaged in the kind of source criticism which allowed them to neglect questioning the authenticity of the photographs which they describe as representations of the human and material destruction of the Polish capital. De Bruyn recognizes that the comic genre is an art form that distorts.Footnote ³⁴ This means that in the case of Kaczka it was natural for Jacek Frąś, as he was spinning his tale, to draw distorted cartoon characters. By inking these figures on actual photographs he also distorted the originals, allowing him to offer his own meaning to the image. This is how the Budapest photos taken by Khaldei in 1945 became representations of death and destruction in Warsaw in 1944 for the comic artist. While the artist is free to distort, the historian’s imagination should be kept in bounds by authentic evidence through which he/she describes and analyzes the past.

The crashed airplane photo also appeared in a 1997 documentary film on Khaldei’s life and his photos. It was shown within a sequence where the context was Soviet air power. These frames start with the manipulated 1941 Murmansk photo of the reindeer and the Soviet fighters.Footnote ³⁵ The photograph is followed by newsreel shots of three fighter planes in the air, then another manipulated photo of a propeller and wing of a bomber protected by Soviet fighters.Footnote ³⁶ These scenes were followed by newsreel shots of Soviet fighter planes flying cover over Soviet tanks and ending in the Budapest photo of the crashed glider. The last of the flight sequence features Khaldei recalling how he was transported to Bulgaria in the closed bomb bay of a Soviet bomber.Footnote ³⁷ Judging from a dated Khaldei photo shot in Lovech, Bulgaria, the photographer’s flight took place in September 1944, six moths before Khaldei took his picture of the crashed plane in Budapest.Footnote ³⁸ Evidently, the filmmaker left it to the viewer’s imagination to process the glider image within the air power context. The crashed glider in this case could evoke in the eyes of the uninitiated viewer the representation of a plane shot down by the Soviet aircraft.Footnote ³⁹ If that was the intention of the documentary filmmaker, he created fake documentation by using the Budapest photograph.

Photographs as documents could represent interpretations, but also incontrovertible facts that E. H. Carr in his now classic work on historical method called basic facts. He warned: “The historian must not get these things wrong.” He further fortified his statement by a scholar’s quote: “accuracy is a duty, not a virtue.”Footnote ⁴⁰ For a photograph basic facts may include the correct dating when the picture was taken and the locality seen on the image. As demonstrated in this essay Kheldei’s two Budapest photographs had various afterlives because in several instances these images were put in the wrong contexts. This observation holds true for the comments of the creator of the photos as well as of the other commentators. Their mistakes were due to the ignorance or disregard of some basic facts about history or the history of the photos in question. Their intentions were mostly sincere but by failing to engage in thorough source criticism, they led themselves to commit the falsification of some aspects of history. The application of photographs to strengthen the historical narrative enhances the understanding of the past but, as demonstrated in this essay, such a practice requires careful application of research methodology not only to the written, but also to the visual text.