Practical issues of critical research into historical photography: the case of the Kaunas Ghetto photographer Zvi Hirsh Kadushin

LT1941–1944 m. Kauno geto kalinys Hiršas Kadušinas (1910–1997) mėgėjiška kamera slapta fotografavo geto gyvenimą ir kitus žydus. Išlikusi gana gausi šio unikalaus vaizdinio archyvo medžiaga sudaro atsvarą Holokausto fotografijos istorijoje dominuojančiai nacių perspektyvai. Kadušino nuotraukos yra plačiai naudojamos Lietuvoje ir užsienyje, tačiau fotografo ir jo palikimo istorija vis dar nepateko į akademinį diskursą. Straipsnyje, remiantis įvairiais egodokumentais, interviu, periodikos tekstais ir pačiais vaizdais, siekiama rekonstruoti fotografo biografiją, veiklos metodą ir tikslus tiek nacių okupacijos, tiek pokario laikotarpiu. To siekiant, tiriamos fotografavimo Kauno gete aplinkybės ir atskleidžiamas tolesnis šių vaizdų panaudojimas. Tyrimas atkuria kompleksišką istorinės tikrovės, kolektyvinės atminties, institucinių praktikų ir asmeninio veikimo tinklą. [Iš leidinio]

ENAccording to representation and memory researchers, the Holocaust is one of the most photographed events in modern history on the European scale, and it is photographs that tell the story of this event to the broad public. However, at the same time, the prevailing perspective is the views created by the Nazi or, to be more exact, the perspective of the perpetrators of the crime. Two cases stand out globally in this context – the Łódź Ghetto in Poland and the Kaunas Ghetto in Lithuania. In the first case, two employees of the Department of Statistics of the Łódź Ghetto – Mendel Grossman (1913–1945) and Henryk Ross (1910– 1991) – captured their environment on film. In the second case, it was the electromechanical engineer Zvi Hirsh Kadushin (1910–1997). With his amateur camera he took several hundred pictures in the Kaunas Ghetto. In both cases, ghettoes were unofficially photographed by their inmates, and thanks to them, huge visual archives of the exterminated communities have been preserved for the future. In this way, a counterbalance to the Nazi perspective emerged in the historical visualisation of the Holocaust. Though the views from both ghettoes are quite popular in the publications and exhibitions devoted to the Holocaust today, thus far the case of Łódź has attracted more serious academic attention. The analysis of literature on the Holocaust in Lithuania revealed that any Lithuanian and international publication includes at least one photograph taken by Kadushin, and these photographs account for respectively a third or a fourth of the published views from that period. However, most often the publications totally disregard the photographer and only sometimes abstractly refer to thousands of secretly taken pictures which supposedly reveal the life in the Kaunas Ghetto.This is so because the history of the Kaunas Ghetto or, more generally, that of the Holocaust rather than the history of the photographs themselves is always in the centre of attention. A paragraph in the publication "Lietuvos fotografijos istorija" [A History of Lithuanian Photography] is devoted to Kadushin; however, other Lithuanian publications use the photographer’s pictures without indi cating the author. Keywords: Kaunas / Kovno Ghetto, Holocaust representation, Jewish photographer. [Extract, p. 127-128]