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Julien Bryan — Photo Gallery

Return to Julien Bryan »

Prewar Poland 1936–1937

A vendor at the market square in Krakow, 1936. During Julien Bryan’s many filming trips in the 1930s, he came to love people in all their diversity. In the 1950s, he was recorded on Edward Murrow’s <i>This I Believe</i> radio program saying, <b>“Twenty years ago, I began to make films about people all over the world. I took them as I found them—not as I wanted them to be. Wherever I went I soon discovered that when you break bread with people and share their troubles and joys, the barriers of languages, of politics, and of religion soon vanish. I liked them and they liked me. That was all that mattered. I came to find that people of this world have much more in common with one another than they have differences. I have found this true wherever I have gone.”</b>

Two young Polish girls look at a beauty parlor storefront in Warsaw, 1937. During Julien Bryan’s many filming trips in the 1930s, he came to love the land and its people, in all their diversity. Bryan reported that <b>“Just as a foreign correspondent might write a book on life in China or Japan, giving the background of the people and showing clearly their economic and social problems, I decided to do much the same thing with motion pictures. These were not to be routine travelogues. Far from it. They were intended to show clearly the trials, the errors, and the misfortunes as well as the progress of the countries in which they were made. I visited Russia and Siberia, Turkey, Finland, and Poland, China and Japan, Mexico and Nazi Germany. All this in peacetime, working slowly and deliberately to obtain an honest and balanced story of normal life throughout the world.”</b>

Nazi Germany 1937

A pupil at the Goldschmidt Jewish private school in Berlin-Grunewald conjugates the Hebrew verb “to ask” on the chalkboard. Back in the United States, Bryan regularly gave lecture tours with accompanying motion pictures to convey what he had seen and the threat that he thought the Nazis posed to peace in Europe. During one of these presentations on Nazi Germany in 1938, he said <b>“This is a special Jewish school. Probably by this time all of you realize… [there are] no Jewish faculty in any university, or high school, or elementary school…. This country which five years ago was… one of the most civilized among the countries in the civilized world. And back today to the Inquisition…. To my mind, in another five years there will be very few of these five hundred thousand Jews left alive.”</b>

A group of young German boys view “Der Stuermer,” “Die Woche,” and other propaganda broadsheets posted on a fence in Berlin, 1937. Bryan contributed film material to eleven “March of Time” episodes, including Inside Nazi Germany (1938), which was one of the few newsreels to directly and critically examine Nazi Germany and highlight the persecution of the Jews. This image appears in that newsreel.

A page from one of Bryan’s 22 original contact print booklets on Nazi Germany showing a unit of the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or German Labor Service) marching with shovels on the Zeppelin Field during a rally at the 1937 Reichsparteitag (Reich Party Day) in Nuremberg. Bryan contributed film material to eleven “March of Time” episodes, including Inside Nazi Germany (1938), which was one of the few newsreels to directly and critically examine Nazi Germany and highlight the persecution of the Jews. This image appears in that newsreel. There are approximately 100 contact print booklets in the Julien Bryan Collection. These horizontal staple-bound books contain 8 to 12 pages with 3 black and white thumbnails per page. Each cover is labeled in Bryan’s handwriting with location, year and film number and many of the individual photographs are labeled with the frame number.

An anti-Jewish sign posted on a road in Germany reads, “Jews are not wanted here.” Back in the United States, Bryan regularly gave lectures with accompanying motion pictures to convey the looming dangers he foresaw in Europe. During one of these presentations on Nazi Germany in 1938, he said <b>“And then a sign like this. Along the Rhine you see these signs against the Jew everywhere, … all through central and southern Germany, saying simply and uniformly the same thing. Jews are not wanted here…. Out of my own curiosity because I am a reporter who is anxious to get both sides of the story – I talked further with these peasants and in a number of cases I asked the German people along the Rhine … how come these signs? Who put them up? They rather laughed about it all and not too pleasantly, and they denied having anything to do with it. They had not put it up and nor had the Nazi Party leaders who came. When I pressed further, I learned of course that they did not dare take them down…. In a village like this and several nearby, none of the people had ever known a Jew.”</b> Bryan contributed film material to eleven “March of Time” episodes, including <i>Inside Nazi Germany</i> (1938), which was one of the few newsreels to directly and critically examine Nazi Germany and highlight the persecution of the Jews. This image appears in that newsreel.

An advertisement for a film and lecture entitled “Inside Nazi Germany” by Julien Bryan to be presented at the St. Louis, MO, Municipal Auditorium on April 13, 1939.

Siege of Warsaw, Poland 1939

The U.S. passport issued to Julien Bryan on February 20, 1939, containing numerous stamps and visas. Bryan was filming on his own in Western Europe and found himself in late summer 1939 with 6,000 feet - roughly an hour - of unexposed 35mm motion picture negative left over. There were rumors and rumblings throughout Europe, so he decided to head for Warsaw without knowing precisely what was about to happen. As he was on the train, Germany launched its war on Poland. Given open access to the city by the mayor of Warsaw, Bryan filmed day and night for two weeks in September 1939, documenting Warsaw’s destruction. He took his cameras under the same bombing and shelling faced by everyone in Warsaw. Later, he wrote, <b>“I was not making a travelogue. I was in Warsaw, whether I believed it or not, making a historical record on film of what happens in modern war. People might not believe my story if I told it in words when I returned to America. Everyone would believe my pictures.”</b>

Days after the German invasion of Poland, Julian Bryan films German planes from the roof of the American Embassy in Warsaw. In his book <i>Siege</i>, Bryan wrote, <b>“Toward the end of the siege I was on the roof of the embassy.... It was so exciting and thrilling that I quite forgot my fear. During the next half-hour I took three hundred feet of film as Nazi planes dove down within a few hundred yards of the embassy roof, seeming, through my view finder, to be almost upon me.”</b>

Civilians walk and bicycle past a business protected by sand bags in besieged Warsaw, 1939. Soon after Julien Bryan returned to the United States, he had more than 150 of his original black and white negatives produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides at Edward van Altena’s studio in New York City. Lantern slides are positive images on glass that were intended to be projected for viewing. Before color film became widely available, these slides were often hand-painted to create vivid color works. Lantern slides became popular in the United States in the late 1800s and continued to be widely used until the 1930s, when they were gradually replaced by more convenient 35mm slides.

Under the supervision of Polish soldiers, elderly religious Jews dig anti-tank trenches to try to impede the German invasion. This photograph has been so widely used that it has become iconic of the early days of the war in Poland. Unfortunately, it is very often misused. It is usually seen without attribution to Julien Bryan and regularly described as Jews at forced labor under guard of an armed German soldier. In fact, the man holding the gun on the left is a Polish soldier overseeing civil defense work. Soon after Julien Bryan returned to the United States, he had more than 150 of his original black and white negatives produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides at Edward van Altena’s studio in New York City. Lantern slides are positive images on glass that were intended to be projected for viewing. Before color film became widely available, these slides were often hand-painted to create vivid color works. Lantern slides became popular in the United States in the late 1800s and continued to be widely used until the 1930s, when they were gradually replaced by more convenient 35mm slides.

Polish women line up for bread distribution in besieged Warsaw. These women waited for hours and received only one loaf for an entire family. As is evident from this photograph, Bryan was always eager to capture on film – as he did everywhere in the world – the humanity of the people with whom he shared time and space. After the war, he said <b>“For after all the great story of the siege of Warsaw was not the ruined buildings, or the guns, or the German bombers overhead. The great story was what happened to the common people in Warsaw, the old men and women, mothers, little babies, and the tens of thousands of civilian workers who carried on, who did not quit their job[s].”</b>

A Polish couple crosses Poniatowski Bridge in the city of Warsaw by bicycle with a few of their possessions. This image from a 35mm slide was one of the few that Bryan shot directly onto color film. In his book <i>Siege</i>, Bryan wrote, <b>“Wherever one looked there were hundreds of people on foot, on bicycles, pushing wheelbarrows and even baby carriages loaded down with their bedding and a little food. Occasionally one had been lucky enough to find an old wagon. They seemed always to be going in different directions – north, south, east and west. Why was this? After all, they were homeless. They had to find shelter somewhere. Each night at five-thirty the Nazis sent over more bombers, and each morning a whole new section of the city was destroyed. So they went, not always wisely, to another part of town where they hoped they might be taken in.”</b>

Bryan’s typewritten notes corresponding to his 35mm nitrate negative film capturing night time scenes of the Jewish quarter of Warsaw on fire. This event occurred on September 16, 1939 during Rosh Hashanah (watch Bryan’s film footage under RG-60.3985 in the Film and Video catalog). The Germans deliberately chose this day to set the Jewish quarter on fire, burning and destroying more than twenty full city blocks.

Nine year old Ryszard Pajewski sits among the ruins of his home in the neighborhood of Praga in Warsaw after it was destroyed during a German air raid.

A page from one of Bryan’s 21 original contact print booklets on Poland 1939 showing Polish women standing horrified after the destruction of their homes by the Germans. In the foreground is the corpse of a woman killed in the air raid. There are approximately 100 contact print booklets in the Julien Bryan Collection. These horizontal staple-bound books contain 8 to 12 pages with 3 black and white thumbnails per page. Each cover is labeled in Bryan’s handwriting with location, year and film number and many of the individual photographs are labeled with the frame number.

Two Polish women look at the destruction of an apartment building on Na Skarpie Street in besieged Warsaw. Ladders were placed against the ruins so that men could dig out the wounded and dead. They found fourteen women and children killed by the bombing. Soon after Julien Bryan returned to the United States, he had more than 150 of his original black and white negatives produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides at Edward van Altena’s studio in New York City. Lantern slides are positive images on glass that were intended to be projected for viewing. Before color film became widely available, these slides were often hand-painted to create vivid color works. Lantern slides became popular in the United States in the late 1800s and continued to be widely used until the 1930s, when they were gradually replaced by more convenient 35mm slides.

A young Polish Catholic priest removes religious items including a crucifix from his destroyed church in Warsaw. The church was bombed at 11:15 in the morning while services were in progress. The entire right wing of the building had been blown away, and in its place was an enormous crater. Luckily, the parishioners had heard an alarm for the German air attack and were able to escape before the bomb struck. In this photograph, Bryan captures the magnitude of loss that the deeply religious and faithful people of Poland witnessed. In doing so, he questions the military motive of the German attack on Poland.

A twelve-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika mourns the death of her older sister Anna, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid. Anna and six other women, desperate for food, were digging for potatoes when Nazi planes strafed the field. In 1959, Bryan recalled the experience, <b>“Several hours passed before Kazimiera learned that Anna was dead and her father and mother injured. She ran to the potato field where Anna was lying. Kazimiera recognized her sister by her dress. For the first time in her life, she understood what death meant, that it could take someone she loved. Sobbing in rebellion and grief, she clutched Anna’s hand. It was cold. And then she understood that all was lost. She was helpless. She did not wipe away the tears running down her cheeks; she cursed childishly the Germans and the war. In front of the pear tree a group of strangers had stopped. A motion picture camera was buzzing gently. One of the men approached Kazimiera. He stroked her hair, raised her from her knees. He was a foreigner. She did not understand what he said but she knew that his words were from his heart and that he wanted to comfort her.”</b> He concludes, <b>“Her story is the story of the people of Warsaw under siege, occupation, and the gray hardship of reconstruction.”</b>

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 Warsaw. Soon after Julien Bryan returned to the United States, he had more than 150 of his original black and white negatives produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides at Edward van Altena’s studio in New York City. Lantern slides are positive images on glass that were intended to be projected for viewing. Before color film became widely available, these slides were often hand-painted to create vivid color works. Lantern slides became popular in the United States in the late 1800s and continued to be widely used until the 1930s, when they were gradually replaced by more convenient 35mm slides.

A man views the bomb damage to the Eastman Kodak film laboratory in Warsaw where Bryan’s still picture film footage was being processed. According to Bryan, he <b>“put the film in the developer at four-thirty, and I left the laboratory about this time and walked home. It was about a mile and a half, but it seemed endless, because the principal streets were now subject to heavy strafing from small artillery…. The two assistants took my films out of the developing tank at five o’clock, put them in the hypo, and at 5:25 had just placed them in the tank of water for washing. Both men left the room for a minute. While they were gone, a six-inch shell made a direct hit on the laboratory, smashing in the entire wall and completely ruining the developing tank. By an amazing stroke of luck the tank in the corner of the same room, only six feet way, in which my films were being washed, was not even scratched. Most of the pictures which appear [in Siege] were enlarged later from these rolls.”</b>

Julien Bryan speaks to a wounded Polish civilian in Warsaw, 1939. Bryan established an immediate kinship with the people he filmed, and many were equally intrigued by the American photographer. Bryan wrote, <b>“Distressed and godforsaken as these people were, with no shelter, food or even water, they could still be kind to a visitor…. They seemed to think I had come all the way from America just to help them…. I found myself showing [them] three photographs of my six month old baby boy. These pictures I carried in my pocket all summer. For a moment we forgot the war and standing on the ashes of their homes of only 24 hours before men, women and children of Praga admired the little American boy. Then it came time to go and one newcomer begged to see the photographs… In the excitement of saying goodbye and hearing cheers for America, I forgot all about the pictures. They are still, I suppose, in Warsaw, perhaps in the pocket of a man now captured by the Germans, or, more likely, buried in the ruins of a last stand made by the Poles in defending the city.”</b>

Once back in New York City, Bryan quickly heeded the mayor of Warsaw’s call to “escape with these films and let the world know what the Nazis did to Warsaw.” He actively promoted the story and his pictures on lecture tours and in the American press. The first major headline “Documentary Record of the Last Days of Once Proud Warsaw” appeared in Life Magazine on October 23, 1939 with sixteen black and white photographs. In Washington, DC, he presented a “picture-tale of horror” with his movies and colored slides at Constitution Hall on December 1. Here are four of the eight pages that followed in Look Magazine on December 5, 1939 with the front cover lead, “What Hitler’s Lightning War Will Do To England.” The editor introduced Bryan’s pictorial spread with the words, <b>“Gentle, urbane Julien Bryan is nothing like you’d imagine a famous war photographer to be. We can’t picture him excited, or lifting his soft, slow voice to say, ‘Hold it , please!’ But with a camera as unobtrusive as his personality, he wandered about crumbling Warsaw to make a never-paralleled pictorial record of modern war.”</b> Two other pages from this Look article feature a selection of Bryan’s colored images as the “First War Pictures in Color.” These photographs were captured on black and white film and produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides in New York City.

Once back in New York City, Bryan quickly heeded the mayor of Warsaw’s call to “escape with these films and let the world know what the Nazis did to Warsaw.” He actively promoted the story and his pictures on lecture tours and in the American press. The first major headline “Documentary Record of the Last Days of Once Proud Warsaw” appeared in Life Magazine on October 23, 1939 with sixteen black and white photographs. In Washington, DC, he presented a “picture-tale of horror” with his movies and colored slides at Constitution Hall on December 1. Here are four of the eight pages that followed in Look Magazine on December 5, 1939 with the front cover lead, “What Hitler’s Lightning War Will Do To England.” The editor introduced Bryan’s pictorial spread with the words, <b>“Gentle, urbane Julien Bryan is nothing like you’d imagine a famous war photographer to be. We can’t picture him excited, or lifting his soft, slow voice to say, ‘Hold it , please!’ But with a camera as unobtrusive as his personality, he wandered about crumbling Warsaw to make a never-paralleled pictorial record of modern war.”</b> Two other pages from this Look article feature a selection of Bryan’s colored images as the “First War Pictures in Color.” These photographs were captured on black and white film and produced as hand-colored glass lantern slides in New York City.

Bryan actively promoted the Warsaw story and his pictures to Americans as is evidenced by the boxes of press clippings that are a part of the Julien Bryan Collection at USHMM. This newspaper clipping of the “Movie Shorts Quiz” was published in the American press in April 1940. Bryan managed to smuggle his films from Poland through Germany and back to the United States by hiding the rolls in gas mask canisters purchased as souvenirs by an acquaintance. Six weeks later, in New York City, he assembled the footage into a ten-minute newsreel called “Siege”. Released in February 1940, the film became for many viewers their first glimpse of the Nazi invasion and the first visual proof of the horrors of modern warfare.

In 1940, Julien Bryan published a first-hand account of the German invasion of Warsaw in a book called <i>Siege</i>. The publication gave Americans a glimpse of the reality and ruthlessness of war on a civilian population, and, according to a <i>New York Times</i> review, “showed what life was like in bombarded town.” In the introduction, Maurice Hindus writes, <b>“Essentially, it is a story of life in the midst of constant threat of death. It is also a testament to the faith and heroism of the common man, and, above all, to the will to live which is powerful in all of us and particularly in a people so predominantly peasant and so sturdy as the Poles…. The photographs are more eloquent than words, for Julien Bryan is not merely a photographer…. I know of no one anywhere who can make the camera record the inward drama of human beings as eloquently and as movingly.”</b> The cover of the book shows Jozefa Drzewowska outside a small wooden church after discovering her son missing and his apartment flattened by German bombs. Bryan’s admiration for the people of Poland remained a constant in his later work. He returned to the country in 1958 to document the fate of the individuals he had filmed and photographed twenty years earlier.

Postwar

A Jewish mother in a DP (displaced persons) camp in Linz, Austria holds her infant while waiting in line outside a barracks to register with IRO (International Refugee Organization) officials in 1948. At the time, Bryan was working under contract for UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association) and tasked with capturing images of Europe rebuilding.

One page from Julien Bryan’s annotated copy of Siege. Bryan made notes in this book when he returned to Warsaw in 1958 to discover the fate of the individuals he photographed in 1939: <b>“I wanted to know if my Polish friends of 1939 were still alive, and if they were, to learn what happened to them in the last 19 years. I also hoped to photograph them and their families. It was a very naïve concept on my part. I knew the full name of only one man…. Some did not even know that I had taken their pictures. I had no addresses whatsoever.”</b> With the help of <i>The Warsaw Evening Express</i> editors and an astute interpreter, Bryan located twenty-five people. He published their stories, along with a reprinted version of <i>Siege</i>, in 1959 under the title <i>Warsaw</i>. This particular page illustrates the devastating experience of Balbina Szymanska, the mother of twin boys born in a maternity ward on September 5, 1939. Bryan’s first observation at the hospital was striking, <b>“Somehow it seemed brutal to intrude upon the privacy of these terror stricken people, but I did my job. I was making a documentary record of a thing that was really happening… I was impressed by Warsaw’s will to survive.”</b> Balbina remained with the twins in Warsaw throughout the Nazi occupation, and had just been reunited with her husband after spending months at Treblinka, when the 1944 Polish uprising began. She returned home after hunting for bread, and found that her house had been completely destroyed by enemy shells. On September 5, 1944, the twins’ fifth birthday, the boys and their father were killed. Balbina remarried and is shown in <i>Warsaw</i> with her new family.

Conservation

The Museum’s Film and Video Archive helped to rescue the legacy of Julien Bryan by preserving many of the original films on Poland, which were suffering from serious deterioration when we obtained them in 2003. The longer we waited, the more we risked losing Bryan’s images forever. The photograph on the top left shows the condition of one deteriorating and bubbling reel of 35mm nitrate as we received it. You can see the exact same reel has been completely restored in the bottom left picture, thanks to the expertise and commitment of our partners at Colorlab, Inc. who invented rescue techniques to save every possible frame. The slight image loss shown on three frames in the close-up on the right is a direct result of nitrate decomposition, but is barely recognizable when the 35mm movie plays before the naked eye. Our extraordinary efforts have produced new film copies of 47 reels. There are more than 140 film reels in the collection.

Metal film canisters containing Bryan’s still photographic negative rolls. Each is labeled in Bryan’s handwriting with country location, year, and film number. There are more than 80 rolls of original 35mm still picture negative in the collection.

The Museum’s objects conservator cleaned and air dried all 164 lantern slides in the Julien Bryan Collection, which are now individually numbered, cataloged, and secured in protective archival sleeves. After filming the siege of Warsaw, Bryan produced a selection of his original black and white negatives as hand-painted glass lantern slides at Edward van Altena’s studio in New York City. Bryan regularly gave lectures in the United States using the slides to illustrate the magnitude of the German invasion of Poland. The vivid color images that Bryan projected in Washington, DC in December 1939 shocked the American audience. Bryan reported, <b>“There is no moral to the story. Audiences don’t applaud my lecture. It would be like applauding a funeral. I think half of the audience usually comes out all steamed up and ready to go to war to stop such brutality; and the other half resolved that if war is like that nothing can ever justify it.”</b>

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