George Kadish

George Kadish, born Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin (1910 – September 1997), was a Lithuanian Jewish photographer who documented life in the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust, the period of the Nazi German genocide against Jews. He curated one of the first Holocaust exhibitions by a Jewish survivor for Jewish survivors, entitled Pictures of the Ghetto.

Early life and education

Kadish was born in Raseiniai, Lithuania, in 1910, and later moved with his family to Kovno (Kaunas). Before World War II, he taught mathematics, science, and electronics at a Hebrew high school in Kovno. Kadish was an avid amateur photographer and built his own cameras.

Kovno Ghetto photography

During the period of Nazi control of Lithuania, he photographed various scenes of life and its difficulties in the ghetto in clandestine circumstances. Kadish constructed cameras by which he could photograph through the buttonhole of his coat or over a window sill. Because of his technical training, Kadish was assigned to the X-ray department of a German military hospital outside the ghetto, where he had access to photographic chemicals and was able to obtain film. To preserve the images, Kadish concealed photographic material in a modified crutch and later hid the negatives underground in milk cans.

With his selfmade camera and a hidden Leica, Kadish was able to photograph scenes that German and local authorities would have treated as dangerous evidence. His photographs include images of children, forced labor, deportations, underground schooling, the ghetto jail, and the destruction of the Kovno ghetto. Among the scenes he documented were prisoners behind a barred window in the ghetto jail, a member of the ghetto underground hiding supplies in a well, children working in ghetto workshops, Jews collecting potatoes, deportation actions, shoes left behind after a deportation, the burning and ruins of the ghetto during its liquidation, and the exhumation of a mass grave at the Ninth Fort after the liberation of Kovno.

Postwar exhibitions and legacy

In 1945, Kadish organized ''Pictures of the Ghetto'', a traveling exhibition based on his photographs from Kovno. It was shown in Landsberg, Feldafing, and Munich, where it reached displaced persons communities. Historian Rachel E. Perry later described it as one of the first exhibitions created by a Jewish survivor for Jewish survivors.

Kadish's photographs were later included in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition ''Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto'' and in the travelling exhibition ''Light One Candle'', which premiered in 2001 and was later shown at the YIVO Institute in New York.

Bibliography

• Kadish, George, et al. Days of Remembrance, 1987: Family Life in the Kovno Ghetto. San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991. The book is the catalog of Kadish' work, as displayed in 1987 at the Russell Senate Office Building.

• George's Kaddish for Kovno and the Six Million. Catherine Gong, edited by Michael Berenbaum. 2009. Also located at Stanford University (Cecil H. Green), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive, and Tom Lantos Foundation for Human Rights. See also, http://catherinegong.com/georges-kaddish-for-kovno-and-the-six-million/

References

2. "The Final Reckoning" Author Sam Bourne : Published by Harper Collins. References to George Kadish

External links

• link to online Holocaust Encyclopedia article with links to photographs by Kadish The interview was produced in ca. 1997 for use in the film Kovno Ghetto: A Buried History. The 65-minute interview records Kadish’s account of life in the Kovno ghetto under German occupation and his recollections of the conditions in which he made several of his photographs."
• webpage with several photographs of life in the ghetto
• Mediated Memories: Holocaust Narratives and Iconographies in Lithuania After 1990, Gintare Malinauskaite, 2017. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin "In Lithuania clandestine pictures were taken in the Kovno ghetto by George Kadish, an amateur photographer. His photographs depicted the ghetto streets and portraits of the Lithuanian Jews. The work suggests that Kadish, while recording the life in the ghetto with his camera, resisted the Nazi regime that wanted to completely erase not only the Jews but also any traces of their existence. In contrast to the Nazi imagery, he depicted the Jews in the Kovno ghetto as human beings and not as a pile of dead corpses. His photographic records sought to display that the inhabitants of the ghetto, in spite of the harsh conditions and humiliations, were capable of surviving in a human manner. Therefore, it is not surprising that these portrayals until today are worldwide mediated, and act as important sources of visual material in the memoirs of the Lithuanian Jewish survivors. In some cases, they even have triggered memories and evoked remembering and writing about the Holocaust in Lithuania."