Capturing Warsaw at the Dawn of World War II
As German bombs began falling on Poland in 1939, an American photographer made a fateful decision
- By Mike Edwards
- Smithsonian magazine, November 2010, Subscribe
Like other members of his generation, Julien Bryan would never forget where he was or what he was doing when he learned that Germany had invaded Poland. But Bryan had a better reason to remember than most: on that September 3, 1939, he was stopped at what was then the Romanian-Polish border on a train bound for Warsaw.
“Why, at this moment, I did not turn around...I do not know,” Bryan would recall of learning of the invasion two days after the onslaught began. With bombs exploding nearby, the train resumed its cautious journey toward the capital—with Bryan on board for a front-row seat at the commencement of World War II.
Bryan, who came from Titusville, Pennsylvania, had seen combat as a 17-year-old ambulance driver in France during World War I. After graduating from Princeton, in 1921, he traveled widely, taking photographs and making travelogues or human-interest films along the way. That summer of 1939, he had been shooting peasant life in Holland. On September 7, he disembarked in predawn darkness in besieged Warsaw.
“I was in a city about to face perhaps the worst siege of all modern history,” Bryan would write. Other cities, of course, would suffer terrible assaults later in the war—London, Berlin, Hiroshima and many more—but early on, Warsaw was hit by wave after wave of modern bombers, to which the German Army added what Bryan called the “hot steel spray” of exploding artillery as it advanced.
While the retreating Polish Army valiantly resisted the advancing German columns, Warsaw’s 1.3 million inhabitants were subjected to furious bombardment. Hospitals, churches and schools were hit. Bryan wrote that a 40-unit apartment building “looked as if a giant with an ice-cream scoop had taken out the entire central section.” Homeless families crowded the streets, pushing what remained of their belongings in wheelbarrows and baby carriages.
All this was happening, essentially, out of the world’s sight; Bryan was the sole foreign journalist left in the city. He acknowledged the journalistic tingle of getting “a grand scoop,” but he also recognized the historical imperative to capture the horror of modern warfare for the world to see. “I was not,” he realized, “making a travelogue.”
Bryan walked the streets with a Leica still camera and a Bell & Howell movie camera. Day by day the job grew riskier. He confessed that he and his Polish interpreter, Stephan Radlinski, often wanted to run when a bomb landed close by. “But neither of us ran, because each was afraid of what the other might think,” he wrote. On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, incendiary bombs set 20 blocks of the Jewish quarter aflame.
Among shattered buildings near the Vistula River, Bryan took several frames of a boy clutching a bird cage.
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Comments (3)
The people of Warsaw made it a priority after the war to rebuild the Old Town section, which like the rest of the city, had been totally destroyed.
My understanding is that the techniques that were used by the craftsmen who rebuilt these historic buildings, became the standard by which many future restorations of similar buildings were based.
Perhaps a future follow-up article for this magazine might be how this herculean task was envisioned and completed.
Posted by B. Kosmider on December 12,2010 | 09:36 AM
I really enjoyed Mike Edwards' story "On to Warsaw" about Julien Bryan. In 1963, when I was 7 years old, I met Julien Bryan and his wife that summer when they were guests of our neighbor. He fascinated me with his stories of places far beyond my world located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He gave me a trinket from Egypt and the Russian alphabet. Also, he left a signed copy of his book, "Warsaw", a combination of "1939 siege" and "1959 Warsaw revisited". I still have his book and when each of my three children studied this period of history in school, I shared his book with them. I am grateful that I had an opportunity to have met this great man and I am glad that Mike Edwards shared his story with your readers.
Posted by Corinne Lumnah on November 19,2010 | 11:28 PM
ALL of my grandfather's entire family lived in Poland. They were Roman Catholics and everyone of them ended up in Auschwitz. They were all killed except for my great-uncle who had the horrid distinction of having survived Dr.Mengele's (The Angel of Death, I believe he was called) gruesome experiments. The doctor performed vivi-section on my great uncle's arms without anesthesia. His arms shook and trembled until the day he died. The rest of our family became ash...
Posted by sandyra on November 7,2010 | 10:26 AM