The lantern slide was acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2003.
Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former Soviet Union. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Kraków and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw within days of Germany's invasion of Poland in Sept. 1939 and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of World War II. He recorded this experience in both the book,"Sieg" (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940), and the short film,"Sieg" (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940), nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe.
Handcolored glass lantern slide; image shows medium view of four Polish women wrapped in shawls. Inscribed with"EDWARD VAN ALTENA/71-79 W. 45TH ST. N.Y.C" on mat on either side.
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overall: Height: 3.200 inches (8.128 cm) | Width: 4.000 inches (10.16 cm)
Four Polish women view with anguish the bodies of those killed in a field in Warsaw, where they were digging for potatoes during the siege of the capital. In the words of photographer Julien Bryan,"As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all. Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food. But the Nazi fliers were not satisfied with their work. In a few minutes they came back and swooped down to within two hundred feet of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow" [Source: Bryan, Julien."Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited" Warsaw, Polonia, 1959, pp.20-21.]
Hand-colored glass slide