Tsvi C. Walnut

The famous photo. Tsvi Nussbaum thinks he's the boy with the hands up. The SS soldier with the submachine gun (right) is Josef Blösche .

Tsvi Chaim Nussbaum (born October 31, 1935 in Tel Aviv ; died July 2, 2012 in New City, New York ) was a doctor and Holocaust survivor. He gained notoriety for his claim that he was the boy with his arms raised in one of the most famous photos of the Holocaust . However, there are strong doubts about this.

childhood

Tsvi Nussbaum was born in the British Mandate of Palestine . His parents Chana and Yose had emigrated there from the southern Polish town of Sandomierz in 1935 . Because of the poor living conditions on site, they returned to their hometown in 1939. A few days after the attack on Poland in September 1939, the German Wehrmacht reached Sandomierz. What exactly happened to the parents is unclear. Her name is mentioned on a brass plaque in the Holocaust Museum in Spring Valley near New York and the year she died was 1942. Tsvi came into the care of an uncle and an aunt in Warsaw, he lost sight of his brother Ilan. It is not known how the boy perished. In Warsaw, Tsvi was hidden outside the ghetto for a year with his uncle and aunt.

When in 1943 they heard of the possibility that Jews with foreign passports might be allowed to leave the country, the three of them went to the designated collection point, the Hotel Polski . Jews were interned in the building who the Nazis wanted to exchange for German prisoners of the Allies as part of the so-called “repatriation campaign”. Tsvi Nussbaum, the uncle and the aunt are said to have spent a few days in the hotel before the SS ordered them to gather with the other Jews in front of the hotel. According to Nussbaum's account, a soldier asked him to raise his hands. Because Tsvi, who was eight at the time, pretended to be his uncle's son, he was allowed on the transport, which, however, did not serve to leave the country but ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . In an interview, Tsvi Nussbaum described the time in the concentration camp as follows: “As Jews with a foreign passport, we were treated a little better than the other prisoners, because our passports still allowed us to exchange them with German prisoners of war. We were taken to a barrack across from the kitchen. We lived in a confined space with 225 Jews, but we didn't get a number tattooed on our arms and we continued to wear our normal clothes. "

Tsvi Nussbaum, his aunt and uncle survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Palestine together in 1945.

Living in the USA

In Palestine, Israel since 1948, Nussbaum, who lived in a kibbutz, became depressed and often thought of suicide. In 1953, at the age of 18, he went to New York with his uncle, where he quickly learned English, graduated from high school and studied medicine. Nussbaum was an ear, nose and throat doctor in hospitals and in his own practice in Rockland County, New York State, for 27 years and also lived there as a retiree. He and his wife Beverly had four daughters and seven grandchildren. He died after a prolonged illness at the age of 76 on July 2, 2012 in New City , New York.

Controversy over the photo

Jürgen Stroop , commander of the SS , police and Wehrmacht units responsible for the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising , prepared a report on these events. Part of it was also a section with over 50 photos showing scenes of the uprising. One of the most famous photos of the Holocaust is the one with the boy raising his hands. It is exhibited in many museums and memorials, has been reprinted in numerous books, and used in documentaries. To date, it is unclear which people can be seen in the photo. Only the SS-Unterscharfuhrer Josef Blösche , responsible for the murder of several hundred Jews, could be identified beyond any doubt. He can be seen in the picture on the right and is pointing a machine gun at the boy with his arms raised.

In 1982 the New York Times published an article in which Tsvi Nussbaum stated that he thought he was the boy pictured. In his opinion, the picture was taken on July 13, 1943 in front of the Hotel Polski. A soldier asked him to raise his hands. In 2003, he said in an interview with Richard Raskin that he could not remember any photographer.

The historian Lucjan Dobroszycki of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research expressed clear doubts about Nussbaum's history in the New York Times article . So all other pictures from the Stroop report were taken in the ghetto. It is also assumed that the report was completed in May 1943 and sent to Heinrich Himmler and Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger , long before Tsvi Nussbaum was deported from the Hotel Polski. In addition, some of the prisoners in the photo are wearing white bracelets with blue stars of David, which Jews in Warsaw were obliged to wear from the age of 12. According to Dobroszycki, it is unlikely that they would have worn such bracelets in the “Aryan” part of the city. In addition, the thick clothes of the prisoners speak for taking the photo in May rather than in July. The soldiers' riot gear also speak against being admitted to the Polski Hotel. The forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns likened commissioned by Richard Raskin a passport photo of walnut from 1945 with the boy in the photo. In doing so, she realized that the two children have different earlobes. Nussbaum has free earlobes, but the boy's earlobes in the photo seem to have grown. This, too, speaks clearly against Nussbaum's assertion.

There are several more people mistaken for the boy in the photo. In addition to Nussbaum, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial also names Artur Dąb Siemiątek, Issrael Rondel, Levi Zeilinwarger and Ludwik Simonsohn on its website.

documentation

• A Boy from Warsaw: Tsvi Nussbaum . 1990, directed by Ilkka Ahjopalo, written by Matti-Juhani Karila, MTV , Gamma TV, Finland, France.

literature

• Richard Raskin: A Child at Gunpoint. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo . Aarhus University Press, 2004. ISBN 87-7934-099-7

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} David Margolick : Rockland Physician Thinks He Is the Boy in Holocaust Photo Taken in Warsaw . In: The New York Times . May 28, 1982 (English, nytimes.com ).
2. ↑ A picture, a child, a story , article in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger from July 19, 2005, accessed on July 22, 2015
3. ^ Obituary on legacy.com , accessed July 22, 2015
4. ^ Richard Raskin: A Child at Gunpoint. 2004, pp. 87, 100.
5. ^ Richard Raskin: A Child at Guntpoint. 2004, p. 90.
6. ↑ German soldiers pointing guns at women and children during the liquidation of the ghetto. In: Websites of Yad Vashem. Retrieved June 10, 2019 .