L'enfant juif de Varsovie : histoire d'une photographie

Traces the development of the famous photo of the little Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto, holding up his hands on the way to deportation, into a symbol of the Shoah. The photo was originally part of a report composed in 1943 by General Stroop on the liquidation of the ghetto and suppression of the uprising. (Pp. 15-42 contain photographs of the Warsaw ghetto from the Stroop report.) The picture of the boy appeared during the Nuremberg Trials, but then fell into oblivion for almost a decade. In France it reached public awareness through the films of Alain Resnais, "Nuit et brouillard" (1956) and Frédéric Rossif, "Le temps du ghetto" (1961). The general tendency during the first two postwar decades to focus on wartime heroism and resistance caused the photo of the boy to disappear from public iconography. However, from the end of the 1960s, the boy began to replace the heroes. Discusses widespread use of the image in various contexts since the 1980s, and how it has been reframed to serve as an image of compassion, stripped from all reference to the perpetrator. Since the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, variations of the image have been used as icons in anti-Zionist and antisemitic propaganda. Mentions the manipulative use of footage of Mohammed al-Dura, a Palestinian boy supposedly killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in 2000, as an example. Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-256) and index. 265 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 21 cm