In 1975, I traveled to Poland to photograph what I could find of its remaining Jewish life. Back then, thirty years after the Holocaust, it was assumed that a millennium of Jewish life in Poland was coming to an end. Selected images from this work – hand-made, silver gelatin prints – became my first professional portfolio and were exhibited in New York. The project as a whole was published in 1977 as a book, Polish Jews: The Final Chapter.
After the book’s publication, the exhibition portfolio was safely stored for what became decades. Those original photographs are now considered “vintage”, and the book is long out of print.
I returned to Poland several times as a photojournalist from the late 1970s through early 1980s. My work for such magazines as Time, Life, Paris Match, and Geo included photographing everything from daily life in a communist country to the newly elected Polish Pope, John Paul II, to the Solidarity movement and its leader, Lech Walesa, as well as other reportage. Whenever possible, I continued to seek out and photograph the ever-shrinking fragments of Polish Jewish life as my own personal project. Except for small "gift prints" made for the people I photographed, and a one-time article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1982 on “Jews and Martial Law” in Poland, these later “Jewish” pictures have never been shown publicly. In fact, they continue to exist only on contact sheets.
It’s a completely different world now. In 1989, with the fall of Communism, perceptions about the future of Polish Jewry were slowly revised. Gradually, the flicker of what remained of Jewish life began to glow brighter as both Poles and Jews of the Diaspora engaged themselves in the reawakening of interest in Poland’s Jewish history and culture. Poles who were practicing Catholics began discovering Jewish ancestry in their family trees; they sought to learn more about their Jewish roots, and pass it on to their children. At present, worldwide media attention is focusing on the “new” Polish Jewish life. There are now rabbis, refurbished active synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish culture festivals, upscale Kosher restaurants, and, in Krakow, even a dynamic JCC with it’s own Facebook page!
Moreover, in 2013, on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, the prodigious “Museum of the History of Polish Jews” is scheduled to open. It is estimated that 500,000 people, 50% from abroad, are expected to visit annually.
In 1975, when the pictures in this portfolio were made, the extent and magnitude of this renaissance would have been an absurdity, unthinkable. That being so, these photographs now stand as monuments to history, a history that the last twenty-plus years have changed.
For this reason, in this collective moment, the time is right to bring my early images of Jewish life in Poland to light, and share them once again. These images bear witness to the fact that not too long ago, no one held out any hope for its survival. They are documents of a moment in history when everyone, including the Jews themselves, considered this to be the final chapter of 1000 years of Jewish life in Poland.
- Chuck Fishman