Károly Kincses

Can One Speak of Jewish Photographers?

 

I started work on this article with considerable reluctance, having grown up and spent half a century of my life without paying much attention to the word "Jewish". Thanks to history and my personal good fortune, or pure chance I have never been obliged to profess my own Christian roots in such a way as to distinguish or differentiate myself from others. Thus the question has not entered into my thinking about photography-or much else; the uncovering and elucidation of other aspects has always seemed more significant and presented a more enticing challenge. Still, I do not wish to deceive myself. Sixty years ago something happened. Sixty years ago several million innocent human beings were exterminated by large-scale industrial methods. For sixty years we Hungarians, both collectively and individually, have been ducking the duty of confronting this and coming to terms with it. Though I myself was not alive at the time, and I neither had nor have the slightest personal involvement, the time has now come when I too can no longer dodge some kind of assessment of its implications for my own work. Let this article then be an honest facing up to the body of facts mustered in preparing and thinking the subject through, a modicum of contrition in light of a crime that burdens humanity as a whole. Each and every one of us can do at least that much.
As far as the question raised by the title of this article goes, I would say that in my heart of hearts, to my way of thinking, one cannot speak of Jewish photographers. Good and bad photographers, yes. Amateurs and professionals, yes. Photojournalists and art photographers, or nature photographers and passport photographers, again yes. But not people who take Jewish and non-Jewish photographs. Looking at two pictures side by side, I for one find it impossible to make such a distinction. Yet when it comes to the photographers and their relatives who were carried off and murdered in the Holocaust, it is equally impossible for me to assert that they did not exist; that, their senseless and unjust deaths, their murder and annihilation purely on account of their Jewishness, somehow did not take place. And if those photographers were murdered purely on that account-I underline: purely on account of their being Jewish-then those murdered photographers were indeed Jewish photographers. So, what I would say in answer to the question I have posed is that one can speak of there having been Hungarian Jewish photographers, but I hope that one will never again speak about Jewish photographers-that is to say, discriminiation shall never again raise its ugly head in this field.
The justly celebrated achievements of Hungarian photography have been examined and analysed from many points of view, but quite certainly not in one respect, which is how many of its practitioners regarded themselves, or (generally with an intent to discriminate against or exclude them) were regarded by others as Jewish by faith or race. Nor has any attempt been made to investigate from a scholarly, art-historical angle in what way that fact shaped their lives, careers and work, their very existence, though I feel sure that certain facets hidden away in this would be instructive for us all. Although no one has ever produced any reliable statistics, the truth is that, relative to their presence in the general population, a disproportionately high number of individuals of Jewish parentage were to be found among the ranks of Hungarian photographers. I am using the term "of Jewish parentage" quite deliberately, because although they included some (not many) pious, Orthodox Jews, by far the greater proportion were assimilated persons who professed themselves to be Hungarians, indeed not infrequently converted to other faiths-Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, Baptist, or whatever-but most commonly were atheists and did not differentiate themselves from others until forced to do so.
If one were to try and classify them according to what happened to them, they would fall into two broad groups. Some chose to leave the strongly anti-Semitic climate of Eastern Central Europe for havens in Austria, Germany or France and subsequently with Hitler's assumption of power and the rise of Nazism in Germany, further to the west, to Great Britain, the Netherlands or France, with many going on to leave Europe altogether even before the outbreak of the Second World War. Among these were André Kertész, Robert Capa, Márton Munkácsi and László Moholy Nagy, all of whom survived to consolidate the renown that they had already achieved.
The other major group comprised those who stayed in the country of their birth. They first became subject to the restrictions on the way they earned their living and their way of life that were imposed by ever more biting anti-Jewish laws, then branded, having to wear yellow stars, conscripted into forced labour battalions, and eventually concentrated in designated areas, initially "yellow-star houses" and later ghettos. From those overcrowded clusters they were dispatched, during 1944 with escalating haste, in freight cars or on foot to per-dition. Some did not make it that far, ending their lives in the clay pits of brick works or on river banks, where they were shot straight into the water.
The chances of returning home once a person had been sent off on such a transport were slim; the Nazi death machine operated remorselessly until the very last day of the war. Many of the very best of Hungary's photographers perished in that manner, Imre Kinszki, Miklós Redner, György Krausz and Andor Sugár among others, but some did make it back, such as Ernő Vadas, by then a bag of bones whose hair had turned white even though he was barely thirty years of age. There were also some who-whether through sheer nerve, survival instinct and luck, or maybe thanks to well-intentioned non-conformists in their surroundings-managed to evade what the authorities commanded in spite of the sanctions attached to such commands, which include summary execution. Such people did not allow themselves be stigmatised and did not move into yellow-star houses but escaped the mass slaughter by hiding under assumed names and with forged papers. Among those who stayed alive in this manner were Marian Reismann, Klára Langer, Miklós Rév, Márta Aczél and Kata Kálmán.
Such was the lot of several thousand Hungarian photographers who were unable to document a pure Aryan ancestry at least back as far as their grandparents. One can form some impression of numbers by examining the data for just one city. From a study of records, statistics and licenses granted to practice the trade, it is possible to determine that the overwhelming majority of photographers who worked in Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania) from the early years of the twentieth century were documented as being of the Jewish faith. Starting with 1941, the studio of every single Jewish photographer in the city was confiscated, and three years later, in the spring of 1944, the entire Jewish population of the city, including all the photographers, were concentrated in a ghetto. Some of them, rather than wait to be deported, chose to take their own lives, such as Jenő Róna and his wife. They had a fair idea what lay in store for them. Those who did not were deported to the extermination camp of Auschwitz or to Mauthausen concentration camp and its sub-camp at Ebensee. Surviving Jews from Nagyvárad were later to testify to the circumstances in which the vast majority met their death. Thus, it is known for sure that Miksa Goldstein, one-time proprietor of the Michelangelo Studio, died in the Ebensee camp, along with his wife and five-year-old son; another photographer, Jenő Salamon, was beaten to death in the same camp.
I have picked a few typical Jewish fates. All I ask is that in reading about them the reader bears in mind that each should be multiplied by two, or ten, or a hundred.

Dr Márta Aczél was the wife of a leading Hungarian historian of photography who was taken off for forced-labour service. "At first, he wrote frequently to instil trust, to reassure and buoy me up too. He gave his fellows in misfortune English lessons, reading Dickens' Pickwick Papers. In the final weeks I sent him a large parcel, of winter clothing, and I know that he received this. At the end, he sent a message via one of his officers that he would try and cross to the Russian side at the first opportunity that presented itself. The place where he vanished is called Uspenska. Whether he froze to death or was shot and killed-there's no way of knowing." Her husband, Dr György Kreileisheim, was the author of a slim volume entitled Old Hungarian Photography, which appeared in 1941. The wife who related the story, herself a photographer, a pupil of József Pécsi, was taken off to the Óbuda Brick Works in 1944 but later escaped from a marching column of deportees that was being driven westwards towards Vienna. She managed to stay in hiding until the war was over. After 1945, she worked in a factory owned by her father, then, after that was nationalised, she became a photographer for IPARTERV, the state project office for industrial buildings.
She is no longer alive, her sole living relative is Tom Lantos, a Congressman in Washington, D.C.

A second memory is that of Marian Reismann: "I have spent, still spend and will continue to spend my entire life as a Hungarian. The fact that I am Jewish is something that was brought home to me by the Jewish Laws. And even more so when a number of my family and friends were wiped out and I found my own life too in peril." One learns from these memories about the many twists and turns in the lives of those who opted to go underground. Marian Reismann finished her studies at the Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen (State School for Photography) in 1931, then worked briefly with her elder brother in Berlin before returning home to open a studio in Budapest: "I worked there until the Germans occupied the country, after which I was obliged to move to a yellow-star house. There was a woman there by the name of Mrs Salamon who was later to be one of the first to join the Communist Party but at that time was a virulent supporter of Hungary's Arrow-Cross party. She once accosted me in the stairwell: 'How does a stinking Jew like you have the nerve to come back here wearing a yellow star?' After that, I didn't go back there for a while."3 Then came the hiding: "In April 1944 I called in on the Jewish Council, where there was a childhood acquaintance with whom I had been to a few parties but who was not a particularly close friend. I asked him how I might rescue my family in Szombathely. He told me about the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I came away thinking he needed psychiatric help or that he should be locked up in a lunatic asylum. And if I myself was unable to believe in Auschwitz in April 1944, how can I expect any non-Jewish Tom, Dick or Harry to believe it?" This was despite the fact that the authorities were doing their utmost to impress on her the futility and fragility of her life: "They posted up on the streets the decree that from tomorrow onwards anyone unable to document three or four Aryan grandparents was obliged to wear a yellow star or otherwise face internment. There was the yellow star first of all, followed by yellow-star houses being designated, which was when people had to move, then the yellow-star houses themselves were concentrated, and the people there were carried off. I myself moved first into a yellow-star house, then had myself transferred, still wearing a yellow star, to Csalogány Street in Buda and a place owned by an elderly couple, Gyula J. Pikler and his wife, who had been left completely on their own. It was from there that I went into hiding on 13 October. I had a piece of paper from the Red Cross to the effect that I was a refugee from the provinces, which I was given by Pál Szegi's wife in the course of my wanderings round the streets of Budapest. I used that to pull back to a place in nearby Trombitás Street, where I lodged with a colonel's widow. It turned out after the war that the colonel's widow herself was Jewish. Meanwhile someone found out that there was an empty house on Sváb Hill, so we moved there. On Christmas Eve that was still a sort of no man's land; we heard the Germans making use of the street front of the house as a gun post for a short while, but they quickly scarpered. Total stillness, desolation followed. A red fox bolted across the garden, then just five minutes later along came the first Soviet soldier. We pitched into cooking for the soldiers in the Soviet army kitchen, which was how we got provisions for ourselves. Where King Béla Avenue runs today there were many dead-that's where we brought the water for the kitchen from, and every time ten or twenty people gathered by the wells there to collect buckets of water, a German Stuka would put in an appearance and strafe the area. We were lucky. The corpses had to be buried. One of the Russians gave me a camera because I told him I was a photographer. So I took photographs there too, which meant I had to take photos of them as well, which we would develop at night by the light of a kerosene lamp with a red-painted cylinder."

The third fate is Eva Besnyő's. She left Hungary to work as a photographer in Berlin as early as 1931. She moved on westwards in 1933, but from 1941, as a Jew, she was unable to carry on working in German-occupied Holland. She acquired a forged document which purported that her mother had had an affair and her natural father was an artist named János Kmetty. Being half Jewish gave her a better chance of hanging on to life. This was the paper with which she took cover, seeking to scrape some sort of existence by taking photographs of farmers' children in the village of Broek in Waterland and producing passport photos in Rotterdam in exchange for food. She was lucky. Having lived a full life as a world-renowned photographer, she died in the Netherlands earlier this year.

The fourth is Robert Capa, whose name was originally Endre Friedmann. When he set off from Hungary, barely an adult, the Jewish community of Pest paid for his train ticket to Vienna, whence he travelled on via Brno to Prague and then somehow onwards to Berlin. Having left in July 1931, it took him two or three weeks to reach the German capital. He studied journalism at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik but in 1933 was obliged to leave a city that was becoming increasingly dangerous for left-wing Jewish intellectuals. He went back to Vienna and thence by boat to Budapest. There he again met up with his Worker Circle friends, making virtually daily calls on József Pécsi's studio in Dorottya Street, just off Vörösmarty Square in the centre of Pest, in order to chat and flirt with the female students there. Quickly realising that the political situation in Hungary boded ill for his kind, he left again-this time for good. His camera recorded many of the major conflicts of the next two decades: the Spanish Civil War; key phases of the Second World War, from D-Day to the final defeat of Nazism; the new Israeli state's early wars; and the struggle of the Vietnamese against the French colonial forces. It was there that he stepped on a mine and died having just reached his fiftieth year.

The fifth was called Gitta Carell. A Hungarian Jew, she led a chequered life, quickly making a name for herself as a photographer in Italy with her portraits of Italian aristocrats, high society, and the ambassadors and staff of foreign missions, including, in the 1930s, some of the best-known studies of Benito Mussolini himself. After the publication of Italy's first anti-Semitic measures in July 1938, magazines continued to publish her pictures but were not permitted to print her name under them. Fortunately, nothing worse befell her. After the Second World War she carried on her work, photographing politicians, industrialists, creative artists and other leading public figures. Around 1960 she completed a set of pictures of Pope John XXIII. Having presumably given up photography, she moved to Israel in 1969 to settle at a kibbutz near Haifa, where she died in 1972 whilst working on her memoirs.

Six. Having tried his hand at many things during his adventurous young life, Zoltán Glass worked solely as a photojournalist from 1931 on after obtaining a post on a daily newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1930 he had founded the Reclaphot agency, which handled advertising material, and also Autophot, which specialised in pictures of cars. Being Jewish and thus unable to work for newspapers from 1936, he moved on to England, taking all his negatives with him, to join the Sackville Advertising agency. Setting a new life went fairly smoothly as he rented a studio almost immediately on arrival. During the Second World War, however, as an "enemy alien", he was not permitted to pursue his profession, indeed he had his photographic equipment confiscated and faced the threat of internment. He managed to survive nonetheless and in 1948 was granted British citizenship. Free to take photographs again, he rented a studio in London's fashionable artists' quarter of Chelsea, working for magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, The Observer and Black Star, as well as (from 1949) various foreign magazines. During the week he pursued advertising photography and at the weekends "fashion shots" that featured little in the way of fashion but all the more nudity.

The seventh is Zsuzsa G. Fábri, a noted photographer living in Hungary: "My father was a bank official, whilst my mother was a practical lady who raised both her daughters at home. I led an emotionally full, congenial and sheltered life until the age of ten, living in the village of Somorja Samorín, Slovakia, just outside Bratislava. In 1938 the area was re-annexed to Hungary. Since my mother was an incredibly fierce patriot, she was passionately devoted to the country; she had a huge influence on us emotionally. After 1943, though, family life was constrained. Not to bandy words, as it's no cause for shame, at least not shame on my part: I'm Jewish. My father was conscripted into forced-labour service, whilst my elder sister, who was in her third year at secondary school, was obliged to report for agricultural work, leaving me at home with my mother. As events turned out, we lost both my father and sister. With the help of Mother's family, we managed to escape to Pest, where we hid until the war was over. That required that everything which had until then been true in my life became fiction; I was not permitted even to utter my own name, I could no longer do what had been regarded as natural when I was a child: our clean, honest, unashamed life became false. I had to lie and tremble with fear every day. Barely in my teens, I now had to grow up, and it was I who kept my mother, that otherwise so strong-minded woman, going. We lived by never leaving one another's side for a moment; that was the only way we managed to survive. We kept our heads down in a boarding-house. We were given papers that were so utterly implausible that I can't fathom why they were ever believed, with Mother assuming the identity of a road-mender's wife."

Eight. Miksa Engländer, a member of the Budapest Guild of Photographers and Enlargers and one of those who presented their work at an exhibition mounted by the Photographers' Circle as far back as 1905, was carried off to the camps as a Jew but returned from Germany along with his wife. He took photographs in the prison yard of the executions of all of Hungary's fascist war criminals, without any official commission.

Nine. On account of her Jewish parentage, Kata Kálmán moved with her husband Iván Hevesy, an outstanding historian of photography, to the summer home at of his brother at Bódvarákó, in the Aggtelek Hills in the north-eastern corner of Hungary. They buried their cameras for safety, since there was not much chance of using them anyway except to photograph their two children. One daughter relates: "Since our mother had grown up in a family of assimilated Jews, her only experience of Jewish customs and the celebration of traditional holidays had been in childhood, with only her grandmother, as long as she was still alive, observing the ceremonial family Seder meal on the first night of Passover. She told us several times about that early experience, and I listened to it as if it had been a strange fairy-tale. I loved munching matzos, which for me was a natural part of the whole Easter feel. I would compete with my older sister to see who was the most skilful at nibbling the biscuit into some shape or other without its crumbling. Meanwhile we would paint the shells of hard-boiled eggs, using the coloured plate in Gyula Ortutay's book on Hungarian Folk Art as a guide. That was about all we learned about Judeo-Christian customs, though those things did sit comfortably alongside one another."

Tenth is Jutka Róna, younger daughter of Imre Róna, who left Hungary for Holland, and became well-known as a photographer there, working in photojournalism, as a still photographer for Dutch cinema and in travel photography. The book Walking on Tiptoe is a recent work on what her life would have looked like if she had stayed in Hungary. The family was Jewish by birth, but her parents, she and her elder sister were all baptised as Lutherans whilst they were still living in Hungary. Her grandfather was a paediatrician of considerable repute, with his practice at 72 Andrássy Avenue. During the war, he was arrested and beaten to death when he hastened to the bedside of one of his patients during the curfew hours.

Eleven. Miklós Müller, better known as Nicolas Muller, died not long ago as one of the best known photographers in Spain. He was born into a well-to-do middle-class family in the eastern Hungarian town of Orosháza. His father, Jenő Müller, in addition to being a lawyer, with the rank of government counsellor and a covert freemason, was also the head of the local Jewish community. At the age of 13, the son was given his first camera by an uncle as a Bar Mitzvah present. At Orosháza the family celebrated Christmas as well as the Jewish festivals. Having attended a Piarist college young Miklós entered the University of Szeged to read law, sharing digs for a while with the poet Miklós Radnóti, who was shot on a forced march in 1944. In September 1933 he moved to Vienna to work for the Internationale Foto Service, getting to photograph the Austrian chancellor, Dolfuss, among others. Taking his law degree in 1936, he worked for a while as an articled clerk in his father's legal practice, meanwhile engaging in socio- photography as a hobby, joining the Group of Modern Hungarian Photographers in January 1937. The Anschluss in 1938, with Hitler's entry into Austria, was his signal to take off for the wider world, knowing that Hungary's future was likely to offer few rewards for young Jews of a leftist persuasion. For ten years he wandered around Europe with a small trunk, a suitcase and his camera. In Paris he was given some assistance by his compatriots, Brassai (Gyula Halász) and Robert Capa, but when fear pushed him to desert France, he ended up being locked up in the prisons of Salazar's Portugal.

The twelfth name brings yet another kind of fate. As a photojournalist in Hungary, Márton Munkácsi was one of the ace reporters for the magazines and newspapers of the Ullstein group, the biggest publishing house in Weimar Germany. Although Ullstein attempted to carry on after the Nazis came to power, and did what it could to resist the growing anti-Semitic pressures, the firm was expropriated in 1933 and the editor in chief, Kurt Safranski, was replaced by a Nazi sympathiser in 1934. Munkácsi, a Jew, was given just one assignment, which was to produce a series of shots for a feature on how to store fruit in winter, but the new editor instantly rejected five of the twenty submitted pictures on the grounds that they included bananas, and those were not an Aryan fruit. The story goes that Munkácsi gathered the pictures together from the editor's table, packed his equipment, sent a telegram to Harper's Bazaar to confirm that he was ready to accept their job offer, and sailed to the New World.

Thirteen. During the 1930s, Gyula Weisz must have been just about the only photographer working along the River Galga, for although his studio was in the small town of Aszód, between Gödöllő and Hatvan, he also went out to villages further up the valley. It is presumed that he was taken off to his death in 1944, along with the rest of the town's Jewish inhabitants.

Fourteenth and penultimate in this series is Ernő Vadas, one of Hungary's most distinguished photographers, whose pictures had been exhibited in fifty countries before the outbreak of the Second World War. The body of work that he published in the journal Új Idők, edited by Károly Lyka, is in itself worth a closer look. From 1930 on, Vadas' pictures appeared there with ever-growing frequency until there is a sudden stop in 1944, when just a single picture is found in the January issue and then nothing at all until 1946, when the same journal again is filled with pictures from Vadas as if there had been no break at all. Yet in between those dates Vadas had in fact been taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and then its satellite camp at Gunskirchen, only returning to Hungary in the summer of 1945. His non-Jewish friend and colleague, Tibor Csörge, wrote of him: "He too was caught up by the monstrous tide of 1944, and all attempts to warn him were in vain. that he should do what others were doing and take advantage of the help being offered by his friends. He declared that the dangers threatening him 'had no basis in law' and 'the measures were immoral', so for him to seek to wriggle out of any consequences would be tantamount to acknowledging the Arrow-Cross perverters of the law. He chose instead to share the sad collective fate of his hundreds of thousands of his compatriots."

Summing up. In 1907, the journalist Sándor Tonelli passed himself off as a photographer's assistant to board a migrant ship heading for the USA in order to gain first-hand experience and gather facts about the earlier lives and motives of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who were leaving the country at that time, as well as to gain some insight into how they made a start in their new home. On the ship, "my two bunk mates were of note principally because owing to them I myself was also thought by the bulk of the peasants to be Jewish. The other reason was my being a photographer, and a photographer could only be either a Jew or a German."

 

Károly Kincses
is Director of the Museum of Hungarian Photography in Kecskemét and its sister organisation, the Hungarian House of Photography in Mai Manó House in Budapest. He is the author of several books on photography and photographers.