CAMERA OBSCURA

Members of Klaipėda's Kibbutz Hachshara. August 18, 1934

Leon Balk

JHSE Awards

Richard Schofield/Camera Obscura

April 30, 2025

For the Attention of the Honorary Secretary

THE LIFE & TIMES OF LEON BALK

An obscure footnote in the history of Edwardian portrait photography, Leon Balk (1878-1939) was a naturalised British citizen who arrived in England from Lithuania in about 1900 and who briefly ran two successful photography studios in the fashionable English seaside resorts of Eastbourne and Bexhill-on-Sea before getting involved in a series of scandals and temporarily vanishing from public life during the First World War. After the early death of his first wife in 1923, Mr. Balk returned to the country of his birth, where he inadvertently reinvented himself as the foremost photographer of Jewish life and culture in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda in the years immediately before the Holocaust. Dying suddenly at the age of 61, and consequently one of the very last people to be buried in Klaipėda’s 200-year-old Jewish cemetery, Leon Balk’s British nationality ensured that his second wife and two young children were able to escape to safety in England in April 1939, unlike almost every other member of the family, who were to soon perish in the ghettos and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. The Life & Times of Leon Balk1 is an investigative cultural history project that sets out to tell the story of the photographer's remarkable and forgotten second life in Lithuania, and to simultaneously locate, document and digitally unify the hundreds of surviving—and considerably scattered—photographs that together make up Leon Balk's immensely important, and until now entirely unknown, Klaipėda archive.

See also Down by the Sea.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

PROLOGUE

Born into a family of well-to-do Lithuanian Jewish merchants in the small town of Tauragė—or Tovrig (טאווריג) as it was once known by its former Yiddish-speaking inhabitants—on January 8, 1878, although Leon Balk is known to have escaped the numerous misfortunes associated with being a Jew in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century, precisely how he ended up in England remains one of the many mysteries associated with his life. Possibly marrying the young Mina Balk née Blumenthal in his home town in 1900, and likewise perhaps meeting and marrying her in London after an unsuccessful attempt to start a new life in the United States, it is at least known for certain that Leon was living with his pregnant wife at a permanent address in the East End of London in 1901.

ENGLAND 1901-1923

Leon and Mina Balk are recorded in the 1901 UK census as living at 87 Leman Street in the Goodmans Fields area of Whitechapel, a part of the city noted at the time for its large Jewish population and extreme poverty. Recorded as being a professional musician, Leon shares the same address with Woolf Kresovsky, a Lithuanian Jewish photographer who it can be assumed was the original inspiration behind Leon's change of profession two years later, when, along with their first child, Maurice, the Balks move to the popular seaside resort of Eastbourne in Sussex, where Leon opens his first photography studio inside the small terraced house they also live in at 114 Langney Road. In 1904, Mina, now known as Minnie, gives birth to the couple's second child, Philip. A year later, Leon Balk goes into business with a Somerset-born photographer by the name of Otto Brown, who operates a second photography studio at 69a Devonshire Road in the nearby resort of Bexhill-on-Sea. The partnership doesn't last for long, and by 1906 Otto Brown is running his own studio in Worthing. After becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1906, Leon closes the Eastbourne studio and moves with the rest of the family move to Bexhill-on-Sea, where they spend the next nine years living in a house close to the photography studio at 23 Sackville Road. By 1908, Leon Balk has become a minor celebrity, and a regular fixture in the Bexhill-on-Sea Chronicle, who write about the photographer in relation to his various social, cultural and charitable activities, as well as playing the violin in the Bexhill Brothers Orchestra, and organising events at the Bexhill Brotherhood Cricket Club. Now wealthy enough to be able to afford a single house servant, by the end of the decade, Leon appears in the newspaper on more than one occasion during the summer of 1909 in connection with the theft of a gold bracelet. More scandal erupts at around the same time when a young woman by the name of Emma Whaley files a paternity suit against the photographer in 1910, claiming he seduced her at his studio the previous June, resulting in the birth of a baby girl. In the same year, Minne Balk is recorded as having given birth to the couple's only daughter, Bessie. By the time the First World War begins in July 1914, Leon Balk is nowhere to be seen, and doesn't show up again for another five years. In 1917,  Maurice Balk, the photographer's troublesome eldest son, is reported as having been arrested in London, where he subsequently appears before a judge at the Mansion House Police Court charged with illegally obtaining pharmaceutical and photographic goods to a combined value of several hundred pounds. In 1919, the Balks move from an unknown address to 230 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, London, where Minnie passes away at the age of about 46 on February 24, 1923. A few weeks before she dies, the former East Prussian city of Memel, known to the Lithuanians as Klaipėda and under the control of the League of Nations for the last four years, experiences a full-scale invasion by the Lithuanian military during the so-called Klaipėda Revolt, whereafter it becomes an autonomous region within the newly founded Republic of Lithuania. 

LITHUANIA 1925-1939

On a currently unknown date, Leon Balk returns to his native Lithuania with his daughter, Bessie, and settles in the port city of Klaipėda, where on October 26, 1925 he marries Lina Bergmann, a 37-year-old German Jew originally from the East Prussian village of Ellernthal. Like her husband, Lina is from a family of well-to-do merchants. The Bergmanns own and operate two shops selling cloth, one in Klaipėda, and the other in the nearby town of Kintai. Lina gives birth to two children, Judith, on February 15, 1926 (just four months after the couple were married...), and David, on June 26, 1928. Klaipėda is home to a large and diverse community of both German and Lithuanian Jews, and is also an important centre of Zionist activity. Kibbutz Hachshara—literally 'Kibbutz Preparation'—trains young European Jews in various trades before they emigrate to Palestine, an enterprise that relies on the cooperation of His Majesty's Consul for the Republic of Lithuania. An undeniably excellent portrait photographer with a wife from a respectable Jewish family, and the only professional Jewish photographer in the city, Leon is in much demand with Kibbutz Hachshara, other Jewish organisations and the many private Jewish clients. In about 1938, the photographer moves from his small studio in Klaipėda's Jewish quarter to a prestigious address in the city centre. Business is going very well indeed, and then, on March 18, 1939, he passes away of unknown causes at the age of 61. Just two days after his death, the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop presents an ultimatum to the Lithuanian government, demanding that if Klaipėda isn't returned to Germany, Germany will invade Lithuania. By the time Adolf Hitler visits the newly conquered city on March 23, Leon Balk has become one of the very last people to be buried in its 200-year-old Jewish cemetery. When the city is liberated by the Red Army on January 28, 1945, almost all of the more than 6,000 Jews who were living in Klaipėda at the beginning of 1939, including almost every single member of Lina Bergmann's family, have been murdered in ghettos and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. 2

EPILOGUE

Among the small handful of iconic photographs that have become forever associated with the Holocaust is this one. Taken by an anonymous photographer on an unknown day in April 1939, the image shows Aron and Jocha Kuhn with their two children, Civa and Aviva, hurrying along an unidentified street in Klaipėda to catch a train to an uncertain future in the Lithuanian city of Šiauliai.3 The Kuhns were among at least 6,000 mostly Lithuanian and German Jews living in Klaipėda at the beginning of 1939, of whom nearly all fled east to Šiauliai and other Lithuanian towns and cities, and of whom nearly all eventually perished. Among them were several of Leon Balk's in-laws, of whom most were murdered in the Šiauliai Ghetto or in a concentration camp after the ghetto was liquidated in July 1944. Among the few that survived was Leon's niece, Mirjam Bergmann, who was eventually liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945, and who finally disappeared in 1946 after a visa was sent to her in Paris from a relative living in Chile. While most Jews in Klaipėda were escaping towards Lithuania during the spring of 1939, on April 24, Lina Balk finally managed to obtain a copy of her and Leon's marriage certificate, and another providing proof of her husband's recent death. Taking only what the three of them could carry, including a few precious photographs including a rare and somewhat bizarre picture of the recently deceased Leon and a lovely hand-coloured print of Judith, Leon, Lina and the children boarded a train to Königsberg, where they caught another to Berlin, where on April 27 Judith and David's names were added to Lina's passport at the British Consulate-General. The family arrived at the port of Harwich a day or two later, and Lina, the daughter of a shochet from a small Jewish village in East Prussia, never spoke a word to anyone about the past.

1 Working title.

2 Leon Balk’s parents, David and Jude/Jehudith née Ziv, wouldn't have lived long enough to experience the horrors of the Holocaust. The photographer's only known sibling, Sheine, is recorded as having passed away in Tauragė at the age of 64 on September 27, 1932. Very few historical records for Tauragė survive, and consequently the fate of the Balk family in general is entirely unknown. On an unrecorded date in the late summer of 1941, Tauragė’s few remaining Jewish women and children were taken to a remote location several kilometres north of the town, where they were made to dig their mass grave before being robbed, forced to undress and shot. 

3 Born in the Lithuanian town of Salantai on November 24, 1891, Aron Puhn, who owned a large printing house in Klaipėda before the war, was murdered on an unrecorded date during the first few weeks of the German occupation of Lithuania. Born in Königsberg on June 7, 1895, his wife, Jocha, née Erschler, who insisted that everyone call her Ella, is recorded along with the couple's two daughters, 10-year-old Civa and 13-year-old Aviva, as being prisoners in the Šiauliai Ghetto on May 27, 1942. Ella was last recorded as being alive when she entered the Stutthof concentration camp without her children on July 19, 1944, where she was subsequently murdered on another unrecorded date. Leon Balk, whose first photography studio was located on a street that ran parallel to the street the Puhn family lived on in Klaipėda, is believed to have been responsible for several surviving photographs of Ella, Civa and Aviva. Research is ongoing. In a curious coincidence, Ella Kuhn was the head bookkeeper at Israelit & Co, one of the largest companies in interwar Lithuania that was part-owned by the Lithuanian Jewish industrialist and textile magnate, Tobias Israelit (1898-1983). Tobias lived in Klaipėda with his wife and children during the 1930s, and was among the Jews who fled the city during the spring on 1939. Tobias' 15-year-old daughter, Dorothea, was sent to a private school in the south of England a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. After studying photography in Manchester and marrying a fellow Jewish refugee from Poland, Dorothea Israelit became Dorothy Bohm (1924-2023), one of the leading female figures in postwar British photography.

KEY QUESTIONS

In no particular order.

• How many of Leon Balk's original Klaipėda photographs survive, how did they survive, where are they today, and what can be new things can be learned about Jewish life and culture in pre-Second World War Lithuania from locating, documenting and unifying them into a single digital collection?

• Leon Balk was active as a professional photographer in Klaipėda for at least 15 years. A conservative estimate on the total number of photographs he took during this period is somewhere in the region of half a million, including both film and glass plate negatives. What happened to them all, and what happened to the equipment in his studio?

•  While the scattered archive that Leon Balk created in Klaipėda is undoubtedly of immense historical importance, research into the life of the photographer suggests that he was neither a hero nor a saint. In a world where cancel culture has become more or less the norm, how, if at all, does this impact on the archive as a serious body of work?   

• How could the story of Leon Balk be used to teach and/or learn about the Holocaust in schools in the United Kingdom?

OUTCOMES

PRIMARY

• A comprehensive article/extended biography about Leon Balk on the Camera Obscura website, with an emphasis on his 'second life' in Klaipėda

• An extensive Wikipedia page in English with multiple links to photographs and related material, with a view to expanding the page in other languages, including Lithuanian, German and Hebrew

• A powerful and entertaining illustrated presentation about the photographer's life and work

• Establishing a digital Leon Balk archive

SECONDARY

• A raised awareness of the UK's role in saving Jews in Lithuania in 1939 and 1940

• New material for a planned book, The Invisible Magicians, about pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photographers

• An exhibition (pending further funding in the future)

METHODOLOGIES

A non-academic, (investigative) journalistic approach, with individual but related focuses on Leon Balk's life in general, his work photographing Jewish life and culture in Klaipėda, and the role played by the British Embassy in interwar Lithuania concerning the emigration of Jews to Palestine, especially during the final months in 1940 before it was forced to close by the occupying Soviet authorities.

—Interviews with Leon Balk's living descendants in the UK and elsewhere.

—Interviews with descendants of members of Kibbutz Hachshara.

—Physical and remote archival research in Lithuania.

—Remote archival research in Germany, England, and the United States.

—General desk research.

—The preparation and distribution of simple questionnaire.

—Site visit to Israel (see Primary Sources ↓).

—Locating, documenting and digitally unifying Leon Balk's surviving Klaipėda photographs. A small sample of photographs can be seen here.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVES, DATABASES & INSTITUTIONS

Lithuania

Ieva Simonaitytė Public Library, Klaipėda

Judaica Research Centre, Vilnius

Klaipėda Regional State Archives

Klaipėda Regional State Archives in Tauragė

Klaipėda University

Lithuanian Central State Archives, Vilnius

Lithuania Minor History Museum, Klaipėda

Vilna Gaon State Museum of Jewish History, Vilnius

Germany

Arolsen Archives

Bibliothek des Nordost-Instituts, Lüneburg

Jüdische Museum Berlin

Ostpreußisches Landesmuseum, Lüneburg

England

Bexhill Museum

Eastbourne Heritage Centre

Eastbourne Local History Society

East Sussex and Brighton and Hove Record Office (The Keep)

London Jewish Museum

Israel

ANU Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv

Ghetto Fighters' House, Lohamei HaGeta'ot

Miscellaneous Kibbutz Archives

Miscellaneous Private Collections

National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

United States

USHMM

Other

British Newspaper Archive

JewishGen/All Lithuania Database

Jews in East Prussia

UK National Archives

Vakarai Klaipėda newspaper (1936-1939)

BUDGET

£4,000

Richard Schofield's fee £2,800

Israel field trip (five nights) £750

Three months' access to the British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) £33.51

Contingency £416.49

MATCHING FUNDS

Lina Balk and her two young children weren't the only survivors in the story highlighted above. I want to research the subject in more detail, with a strong emphasis on British involvement in rescuing Jews in Lithuania during the Second World War. I recently met with Liz Boyles, the current Ambassador at the British Embassy in Vilnius, who is now aware of the project. The Ambassador and her staff have been actively involved in promoting the still almost entirely unknown story of Sir Thomas Preston, which overlaps directly with the Leon Balk story/project. Now that this application is finished, I'll use it as the foundation for contacting the Embassy again with a view to discussing a more concrete project idea. 

SCHEDULE

I'd like to start working on the project during the late autumn of 2025, with the field trip to Israel taking place in January 2026, and a provisional completion date of Easter (i.e. early April) 2026.

RICHARD SCHOFIELD

Born in Crawley, England, on September 2, 1964, I'm a trained journalist and a former filmmaker, travel writer and documentary photographer who’s lived and worked in Lithuania since June 2001. Today, I’m a full-time photo historian and provenance researcher, specialising in all aspects of pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photography, photographers and photographs. Held at gunpoint twice—while filming on the Russian-Chinese border in November 1997, and again in a remote region in central Cuba a year later—I'm the paternal grandson of the English pilot, author and wartime farmer, Harry Methuen Schofield.

EDUCATION

I was awarded an MA (with Distinction) on the groundbreaking Photojournalism & Documentary Photography programme at the London College of Communication in 2009 for a project shot in Lithuania on a ‘technically lamentable’ Nokia E61i mobile phone. Several photographs from this and other E61i projects were combined into the e-book, Nokumentary™, which was published in New York by Dutch Kills Press in March 2015.  

EMPLOYMENT

I didn’t do very well at secondary school, and I consequently spent the first 10 years or so of my working life doing a variety of unskilled jobs from cleaning rich people's houses to working for a small removal and delivery company, most of which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Obsessed with films and filmmaking from an early age, in the late 1980s I began borrowing a friend’s video camera and started making my own low budget documentaries. In November 1998, I was commissioned by the UK public broadcaster Channel 4 to produce, shoot and edit five short films in Cuba that were broadcast every evening immediately after the Channel 4 News during the first week on 1999 as part of the channel's 40th anniversary commemoration of the Cuban Revolution. A chance meeting with a travel writer while researching a documentary film in Bucharest in October 1999 resulted in the offer of a job in Lithuania. In June 2001, I became Editor-in-Chief of the bi-monthly (and once legendary) Vilnius In Your Pocket print guide. I continued working for In Your Pocket as a freelance writer, editor, photographer and production manager in 11 European countries until September 2019.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE (HIGHLIGHTS)

One the same day our MA group exhibition opened at the Printspace Gallery in London in March 2010, I was commissioned by a UK-based travel publisher to spend six weeks travelling and taking photographs in Russia, an adventure I wrote about for a British photography magazine the following year. Always more interested in other people's photographs than my own, I subsequently curated two small exhibitions of never-before-seen photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival in October 2012 and Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College in April 2013. Five months after the Cambridge exhibition, I accidentally stumbled upon a collection of just over 100 pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish family photographs that had been smuggled out of the Kovno Ghetto by an unknown person or persons in October 1943, an event that quite simply changed my life. The discovery generated an enormous amount of activity over the next few years, with highlights including a fascinating experimental music project, collectively known as The Kaunas Requiem, and a major exhibition I co-curated at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York in October 2018. Having failed to rescue and renovate an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas whilst simultaneously attempting to photograph every surviving former synagogue in Lithuania while hitchhiking around the country in August 2017 (read the combined adventure story here), I was asked to join an international project with Jewish organisations in Latvia and Sweden in which we devised a Jewish heritage travelling summer school, the first of which took place in July 2019, and that we continue to run every couple of years. Five years before we set off on our first travelling summer school, I established a public engagement-focused nonprofit organisation, the International Centre for Litvak Photography, that was responsible for several of the above projects, as well as 'Fifty Schools', a year-long informal education project funded by the Good Will Foundation during which myself and my colleague, Mariana Iljina, visited dozens (not quite 50) of high schools throughout Lithuania.  After spending the first lockdown helping to look after my dying father in Eastbourne during the spring and early summer of 2020, I returned to Lithuania at the end of June, where I was awarded a small research grant from the Lithuanian Council for Culture that enabled me to begin a long-term investigation that gradually evolved into Camera Obscura, the first project managed by my new nonprofit organisation, the Data Brigade, that replaced the International Centre for Litvak Photography in May 2024. Camera Obscura (↓) was officially launched on January 1, 2025, and is still very much in the early stages of development. It's hoped that The Life & Times of Leon Balk will become its first in-depth micro-project. 

EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS (HIGHLIGHTS)

November 2009—Daily Life Revisited A week-long solo exhibition inside a re-purposed shop in a Vilnius shopping centre as part of my MA final project. 

March-April 2010—16 Photographers Daily Life Revisited (↑↓) in a group exhibition at the Printspace Gallery in London as part of my MA final project. A short piece about Daily Life Revisited by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.

October 2012—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival. A short piece about the Snapshot Citizens project by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.

April 2013—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies' Annual Congress at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College.

2014—Performance Without an Audience & Other Experiments A series of impromptu outdoor exhibitions and events in various Lithuanian towns and cities.

March 2015—Cemetery to Ghetto My last Performance Without an Audience was made into a short film.

September 2016—The Kaunas Requiem A week-long exhibition and live music recital inside an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas. Music from the project is here.

2018—Back to Shul Three very different exhibitions in Prienai, Kaunas and Vilnius. In partnership with the Lithuanian Jewish Community and others.

October 2018-April 2019—Lost & Found Yeshiva University Museum, New York. An article in Moment magazine is here. 

March-April 2024—A Window to the Future Three nights of projections in the windows of the former ORT Technicum building in Wilno/Vilnius. In collaboration with the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library of Lithuania. With Mark Adam Harold (see also here). A short description is here. 

PROJECT CONSULTANTS 

Dr. Ruth Leiserowitz

The world's leading expert on Jewish life and culture in the former East Prussia, as well as being a personal friend Dr. Ruth Leiserowitz is a Senior Researcher at Klaipėda University's Institute of History and Archaeology in the Baltic Region, and is already familiar with the history of Lina Bergmann's family. Ruth is also the author of the 2021 book, Žydai Klaipėdoje (Jews in Klaipėda), which features several photographs that are known or that are believed to have been taken by Leon Balk.

Martin Balk

Leon Balk and Lina Bergmann's grandson. Born in Leicester in 1959. The first person to carry out any research into Leon back in the late 1990s. Has the advantage of possessing a wide range of private family knowledge, as well as direct access to family members. Martin also has a large cardboard box in his attic full of Leon Balk-related material. Martin and myself have had two long and very productive telephone conversations during the last couple of weeks.

CONTACT

If you have any questions about the project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Richard Schofield

Founding Editor

Camera Obscura

c/o The Data Brigade

Avižonio g. 5-1  

Žagarė             

84323          

Lithuania        

Tel. +37063016686

UK Address

23 Upperton Road

Eastbourne

East Sussex

BN21 1LY

Tel. +447760920661

thedatabrigade@gmail.com