A Picture is Worth…?
Promoting historical analysis, critical thinking and challenging bias for Years 9, 10 and 11 students
A picture is worth…?
Complete the expression above.
What does this expression suggest?
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Activity 1: Behind the lens
How can a picture be biased?
Why might the photographer choose to do that?
Do photographic images always show the whole picture?
�How or why might reality be distorted?
Can we always trust what we see in a photograph? ��
Let’s look at the following two pictures taken during the Holocaust.
Who might have taken the photos?
What are people doing in the photos?
Where do you think the photos were taken?
Why might the person who took the photos have wanted to capture that moment?
When do you think the photos were taken?
What do you think is the significance of these photos and artefacts? How are they a witness to the Holocaust?
The first picture is one of the most famous images of the Holocaust.��It was actually taken by a Nazi photographer as part of the Stroop report; who wished ti record the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto for “the historians of the future.”
Has this changed your perception of the Jewish people in the photograph? If so, how?
��Look again at the Warsaw ghetto uprising image. ���Why might Nazis have wanted to portray Jews as weak?
The Warsaw ghetto uprising
Propaganda
“Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.”
‘Othered’
How does the idea of propaganda link to the images in the Stroop report and Nazis wanting to portray Jews as weak?
Can you think of other groups of people in society who are presented unfairly, seen as being different or ‘othered’?
Why might these people be portrayed as untrustworthy or not as important?
Activity 2: The Camera as witness
The following photos were taken inside a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Who is the lady in the photo? � What is she doing?� Where was the photo taken? � Why might the photo have been taken? �When Might the Photo have been taken, and by whom?�
Visual Testimony
In October 1944, Joanna Szydlowska risked her own life to take these photos of the wounds left by medical experiments on the legs of three Holocaust victims.
Entering a Nazi concentration camp meant being stripped of all personal possessions, in 1944, at the women’s camp Ravensbruck, a group of prisoners seized a rare opportunity and traded a piece of bread for a camera belonging to a newly arrived prisoner. The inmates used the camera to record the medical experiments performed on their bodies by the Nazis.
The experiments were designed to replicate and study the combat wounds of German soldiers. Because the prisoners in these photos were members of the Polish National Resistance they were used for medical experiments by Nazi authorities.
These women survived in the overcrowded camp through the help of other prisoners and by using false identities, The camera was burned, and the undeveloped film hidden. When the SS evacuated the camp in March 1945, French prisoner Germaine Tillion was handed over to the Swedish Red Cross; she took the film with her and later developed it in Paris.
The camera became the women’s witness
Why is this considered an act of resistance?
Why did they feel it was important to take these photographs in such dangerous conditions?
Discuss the bravery of those women who were able to document this time
Activity 3: Challenging bias and misinformation
Consider the imagery and the language in the following social media post.
Misinformation on social media
Pictures in the media and on social media often show people on boats coming to the West. They don’t show what they’re running from.
Millions of people around the world flee from their homes due to war, violence and persecution
Syria is not poverty stricken; these refugees are escaping a war.
“82.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced at the end of 2020 as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.”
(the UN refugee Agency)
To help put this in context, that’s more than the population of the UK
What is the bigger picture?
When looking at the pictures on social media, think:
Who is posting the photo?
What is their purpose?
Is it fair?
Is this the whole picture?
What are reflective ways of getting the “whole story” ?
What action can we as a society or group of people take when we see something happening that we feel passionate about?
Can propaganda be positive?
Can encouraging bystanders to take action to be negative?
Activity 4: Everyone’s a journalist
Anyone with a mobile phone camera can be a journalist.
Where have you seen examples of when ordinary people have captured images and shared these publicly?
Explain if you think these were shared with or without bias. How do they make you feel?
How could you challenge beliefs?
Think of an issue that is important to you where you believe the media engages is some kind of bias.
Create a visual project that is a critically sourced reflection or presentation of this issue
What does Elie Weisel’s quote mean?
What hurts the victim the most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
Supporting Material
The following slides provide background information on the Holocaust and the Stroop report
What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazi regime and its collaborators to murder all of the European Jewry during the Second World War. This genocidal policy cab be seen to have evolved during the war as the Nazi regime gained more territory, and as more Jewish people came under their control. It culminated in the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children.
The Nazi regime had created policy and legislature to ostracise German Jews and those Jews living in other states occupied by the Nazi regime prior to the Second World War. They also instigated the events of the November Pogrom (‘Kristallnacht’) in 1938
The Nazi regime also carried out genocidal policies towards those with mental and physical disabilities, Polish and Slav peoples as well as the Roma and Sinti peoples of Europe. They additionally persecuted groups including gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, those seen as political dissidents and Soviet prisoners of war.
The Stroop Report
The photograph you see in this presentation is from the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. It is one of the photos included in the Stroop report, an official report documenting the German suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Like the rest of the photos in the report, it depicts Jewish victims as passive and subhuman.
Named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most iconic images of history this photo formed part of General Stroop’s 1943 report on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising for SS chief Heinrich Himmler. After the war, it was used as evidence of Nazi crimes in court.
Nazi propaganda photos like this present victims as helpless and terror-stricken; their desperate state was intended to reveal a ‘racial otherness’.
The photos in the Stroop report do not show that the ghetto uprising was a fierce act of Jewish resistance to the Nazi genocide. And they do not show that most of the people in this image were about to be taken to the gas chambers
Visit The National Holocaust Centre and Museum and listen to incredible survivor stories first-hand, interact with historical artefacts, plant a rose in our memorial garden, and more