Two photographs showing Nazi soldiers abusing Jews who were taken out of a synagogue. It is commonly believed that the photographs were taken either in Łuków, near Lublin, or in Tarnów, near Kraków, during the early period of the German occupation of Poland. Fall, 1942. A rare documentation of public antisemitic humiliation carried out by the Germans.
Two follow-up photographs documenting an incident of the humiliation of Jews near the synagogue. The photographs show Orthodox Jews, some of them wearing prayer shawls (tallitot). In the foreground of one image, two of them are kneeling, forced to raise their hands, surrounded by armed German Wehrmacht soldiers, some of whom are seen smiling. In the second photograph, a Jewish man is bent over another Jew. he is not kneeling on the ground, but rather forced to bend over the other as part of a humiliation ritual known as the “horse ride” – an act of degradation imposed by the Nazis. At Yad Vashem, this photograph is described as: “German soldiers humiliating a Jew wrapped in a tallit, likely in the fall of 1942.”
According to records from the Yad Vashem archive, two individuals identified the humiliated Jew, each with a different claim. Martin Sept, a Holocaust survivor living in New York, identified the man as Isaac Wrobel (son of Shlomo and Zlateh), who taught him to read from the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah. This information was conveyed by Professor Zvi Ankori, Wrobel’s son and a native of Tarnów. According to a Yedioth Ahronoth Holocaust Remembrance Day article from April 12, 2010, the man kneeling in the foreground is Baer (Dov) Ehrlich Sloshny, maternal grandfather of former Mossad director Meir Dagan.
The Jewish man with the white beard standing at the center of the first photograph, in which the Germans are preparing the two men for the cruel “game, ” has been identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as Motel Hershberg.
The smiling officer is believed to be Obersturmführer Otto von Mallotke, whose name also appears in Chapter 16 of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, in the context of Kraków and Plaszow. He belonged to Reserve Police Battalion 101. His cruelty is also mentioned in the video testimony of Halina Nelken, featured in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust documentation project.
Such humiliations often preceded pogroms or deportations to concentration and extermination camps. Soldiers would round up Jews, especially religious ones, and force them—often violently—into degrading acts, photographing the scene as part of the dehumanization process. The photographer is unknown. According to various reports, a local Polish youth found the photograph and passed it on to Jewish survivors who returned to the town after the war.
Identical size: 9×14 cm. Divided backs for use as postcards. Very good condition.
