“Can you turn around, and walk past again, one more time?” – something similar must have said Emmy Andriesse that she ran on the street during the Hunger Winter in February 1945.
In the last months of the war, this kind of photos often went to London, to the Dutch government in exile through the resistance. He knew about the famine in the non-freed part of the Netherlands, but images say more than words, as is known. Only when seeing the harrowing photos of malnourished people really came in and food drops were set up. So these photos have saved lives.
From May, these eighty -year -old photos can be seen in Foam, five minutes’ walk from Keizersgracht 568 where the first exhibition opened in June 1945, in the then photo studio of Marius Meijboom. It showed how a group of photographers, Clandeestien, had documented the last months – hunger, scarcity, sang kitchens, food drops and the crazy joy of the liberation.
That exhibition attracted a lot of international interest at the time. War correspondents from dozens of countries tried to get photos for magazines like Life and Garlic. The exhibiting photographers were fully interviewed. The exhibition went traveling, photo albums. Included, the visibility was so great that you can safely say that these photos also determined the image about the war. Anyone thinking of the Hunger Winter now sees Andriesse’s photo of that boy in front of him.
That is why it was recently decided that this collection will be UNESCO heritage-as the first Dutch photo collection. It is registered in the ‘Dutch memory of the world register. ‘ This overview contains more documents that determine the war and our gaze.
Spy photos
All this precedes a special history. It started in September 1944, after Dolle Tuesday. Resistance leader Tonny van Renterghem and the Jewish photographer Fritz Kahlenberg, who fled from Germany, had an idea. Some photographers they trusted wanted to ask them to record life during the occupation. It became Andriesse and Meijboom, Carel Blazer, Charles Breijer, Cas Oorthuys, Krijn Taconis, Ad Windig and others. Around ten photographers formed the core of the group that consisted of around thirty to forty people, many in Amsterdam but also in Delft and The Hague, for example. The exact number is unclear because a central organization was risky: Kahlenberg visited them individually and acted if he was just a messenger, instead of the pivotal figure. The more you kept on the plain, the safer.
Cas Oorthuys Shortly after the liberation, he demonstrates illegally during the occupation. Two women On the way back of a hunger trip at the beginning of 1945.
Photos Cas Oorthuys and Charles Breijer / Nederlands Fotomuseum
Some of these photographers already had experience with socially engaged photo reports, but this was different: espionage photos. They were intended for London and for the resistance, which had to know of semi-military nodes. There was also the realization that this was a crucial time, which for that reason alone had to be recorded. That was sometimes difficult: people were so used to the German presence that they had to think carefully about what was different again – oh yes, that there were now candles burning in shop windows instead of electric light, or that horses cared cars. They recorded that.
They set off for that. Carefully, because from November 20, 1944 a photography ban applied. Breijer parked his bike near a German deposition. He pretended he carelessly rumbled in his bicycle bag, in which a camera hidden. Click, he recorded a scene, unnoticed – his own curved shade is visible in the foreground of the photo. Other photographers had a camera in a shoulder bag or under their overcoat.
Now, eighty years later, we can look into the city from then through this photo collection. To a tram that is dangerously full, because there was hardly any transport. To the commotion around a barrel with herring, when a fishmonger suddenly had something for sale again. To bicycle robbery, raids and prisoners who were taken away by the Grüne Polizei. Proof of repression, and more and more Kahlenberg asked his photographers to register the consequences of the hunger winter. He sent Cas Oorthuys – because he had the right sensitivity to misery – to the emergency mortuary in the Zuiderkerk, to document how there were dozens of bodies that were no longer buried. No boxes, no staff.
There were rows in front of the soup kitchens and there was a lot of black trade where sometimes arguments got out of hand. Theft, demolition, usury prices – the photos show people together but without collectivity. The hunger created a moral decline, it became everyone for itself.
The activities of the resistance, such as the forging of papers, were also photographed. It never went wrong. A few times a photographer was arrested who managed to escape, via bluff poker or otherwise a toilet window.
Hero
The plans for the exhibition had started in February 1945. Van Renterghem and Kahlenberg understood that the photos were needed for outsiders to understand how heavy it had been. They chose the photos at Meijbooms Studio. He was close to German authorities who still had electricity – a handy friend taped that. Thanks to two rolls of Gevaert photo paper, they were able to properly print the photos. Film material was also shot, which was handed over during the liberation to probably British troops, and lost in England, probably in the catacombs of the Aviation Minister.
Zwanenburgstraat. Closing Jodenbuurt at De Waag, Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, 1941.
Photos Cas Oorthuys and Charles Breijer / Nederlands Fotomuseum
On June 2, 1945, the exhibition opened: “The enemy tried to get us on our knees through terror, from deportations. She did not succeed and we thank this to a large extent to the men and women of the resistance.” With these roaring words, the theme of resistance was underlined. The term in hiding camera was also born.
Of course the images made an impression. Photos do not lie, but, with a distance in time we can also state that they do not necessarily tell the truth. The great emphasis on resistance gave a heroism that was not in line with how little resistance had really been in society.
And also: these photos were taken from September 1944, when all Jewish transports were over. As a result, the Jewish suffering remained out of the picture. There were Jewish photographers, but that was not the point. It was about the hunger winter. That omission may have contributed to the post -war view that the occupation had been so heavy for Randstadelingen, and there was little room for the Holocaust itself.
In hiding Joop Kuijt Crawls in the Oranje Nassaulaan 15, Amsterdam. Legal recording From bicycle bag from Commandopost Kriegsmarine, taken from Emmaplein de Emmalaan in, Amsterdam, 1944.
Photos Charles Breijer / Nederlands Fotomuseum
From Meijbooms Studio the exhibition went on tour, past twelve cities. But Kahlenberg was absent. A power struggle had arisen among photographic collectives. It was about who was in charge of the image of the liberation, and about the rigging of a federation. Kahlenberg loses it. He would have operated on recklessly, was only an amateur photographer and German – that he was a Jewish refugee did not count. Kahlenberg moved to New York, bitterly. But he is now being rehabilitated: NIOD researchers Erik Somers and René Kok published a book in March that highlights him as a pivotal figure. And which shows nothing of recklessness, on the contrary.
In the meantime, the photos around the hiding camera have been spread over different collections, but are together in the collective memory – hence the UNESCO heritage preacher. In the passing years their function was recognized for imaging. From 1980 they have been exhibited several times with references to the rise of the extreme right, with warning words that just don’t want to become superfluous.
Something to think about, now that the exhibition in Foam is settling nearby where it all happened in 1945, where people came together and dreamed of a future full of equality, free of fascism. That realization may also mean something for our imaging.
Amsterdam During the Hunger Winter and De Liberation, 1944-1945. Resistance slots On a shelter Kwakersplein Amsterdam 1944.
Photos Emmy Andriesse / Collection University, Cas Oorthuys / Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum