CAMERA OBSCURA
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
THE ELEPHANT TRUNCATED
1 DOWN BY THE SEA
Nazi Germany annexed the port city of Klaipėda/Memel in March 1939, more than two years before its full-scale invasion of Lithuania. Passing away unexpectedly at the age of 61 less than a week before the annexation, the Tauragė-born studio and portrait photographer Leon Balk, who became a naturalised British subject in 1906, left behind a wife, two young children and large collection of photographic negatives and equipment. While his family managed to escape to England with the help of the British Embassy in Berlin, Leon’s photographic legacy vanished into thin air. Down by the Sea investigates the first known attack by the Nazis on Lithuanian Jewish cultural heritage. A related side project in production can be seen here.
2 HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
David Fishman’s groundbreaking book about the Paper Brigade focuses almost exclusively on the subject of Nazi-looted Judaica. Documents held at the Lithuanian Central State Archives and elsewhere show that YIVO was also home to at least 5,000 photographs before the war. What were they, and what exactly happened to them?
3 ROSENBERG IN KAUNAS
The Jewish Historical & Ethnographic Society in Kaunas operated a public museum and archive in the city’s old town for more than a decade, and yet almost nobody’s ever heard of it. Ongoing research indicates that the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) certainly knew who they were. Along with other Jewish photographic material from Kaunas, in January 1942, the organisation’s photo archive was looted by the ERR and taken to the infamous Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, where some of it miraculously survived.
4 HEART OF GLASS
Of the estimated three million Jewish glass plate negatives that existed in Lithuania before the war, almost all were destroyed. Among the tiny handful of exceptions was a collection of several thousand negatives owned by the Kaplansky photography studio in the small city of Telšiai, cultural objects that were, unlike the Kaplansky family itself, saved from annihilation. An extraordinary story that’s never been fully investigated, Heart of Glass sets out to do just that.
5 THE CURIOUS CASE OF MAUŠA FLIGELIS
One of fewer than 10 Lithuanian Jewish photographers who are known to have survived the Holocaust, Mauša Fligelis’ studio and other photographic material belong to him were expropriated during the first few days of the German occupation of Šiauliai. What happened to it all, and where is it now?
6 ANOTHER KIND OF LEICA TRAIN
Among the list of hundreds of gold and silver candlesticks, spoons, watches, wedding rings and other valuable items that were looted from the recently murdered Jews of Seredžius in September 1941 was a 1935 Leica III camera. Known to have been owned by a currently anonymous individual in Germany after the war, who did the camera originally belong to, and how many other Leicas suffered a similar fate?
7 FINDERS KEEPERS
With the help of surviving family members in Alaska, the bizarre case of Leizer Beker examines the circumstances surrounding the survival of a box of photographs that was found in the Čekiškė photographer’s house after he was murdered during the late summer of 1941, and questions to whom they really belong more than eight decades after the event.
8 THE PORTRAIT OF SELMA VOGEL
The Henrikas Kurlavičius Photograph Collection was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 2013. Allegedly discovered by a non-Jewish resident of the small town of Butrimonys where the family that originally owned the photographs lived before the war, early research carried out by The Elephant in the Darkroom suggests that at least one close relative of the photographs’ original owners survived. The question is, do Jewish museums such as the USHMM have an automatic right to ownership when they receive donations such as this one, or should they be more proactive in trying to reunite their artefacts with their rightful heirs?
9 THE IMPOSSIBLE MUSEUM
During the short lifespan of Vilnius’ ill-fated Jewish museum that operated under constant Soviet interference between 1944 and 1949, it was recorded that the institution held 2,162 photographs in its collection. What they were, where they came from and where they went after the museum closed remains a riddle nobody has so far tried to solve. How could so many Jewish artefacts manage to survive three years of Nazi occupation?
10 AFTERMATH
A unprecedented collection of short stories focusing on a number of Lithuanian Jewish photographers and their families who managed to survive against all the odds.
Produced with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the EVZ Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Finance, The Elephant in the Darkroom is a unique provenance research project whose primary purpose is to investigate and make publicly available all surviving information concerning the systematic looting, expropriation and wholesale destruction of Lithuania’s rich and diverse pre-Second World War Jewish photographic cultural heritage during the German occupation of Lithuania between June 22, 1941 and January 28, 1945.