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Saturday, January 9, 2010

East Brunswick Woman Finds Treasure Trove of Historic Photos from Nazi Era...

When Kim Ciak searched through her grandparents' attic to look for her late mother's Elvis Presley bubblegum cards, she instead, to her great surprise, found photographs — wrapped in linen, stored inside a hope chest — of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis.
The slide-sized photographs, her grandmother told her, belonged to her late grandfather, Julius Dobrzynski, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II and whose duties included defusing live bombs.
Ciak took the photos home with her that February day, placed them in her hutch, and didn't look at them again until after her grandmother passed away in September.
"The photos were interesting, they were very interesting, but I really didn't know what I was looking at," the 23-year resident of East Brunswick said. "It was time I found out."
Last month, still puzzled by the photos, Ciak, a 1985 graduate of St. Mary's High School — now Cardinal McCarrick High School — in South Amboy, sought the help of her former history teacher, Frank Yusko, now a teacher at Spotswood High School.
After receiving an e-mail from his former student, Yusko and his colleague, German teacher Dianna Altmiller, met with Ciak and they both determined the photos were of the 1936 Nuremberg rally.

Kim Ciak, Frank Yusko, and Dianna Altmiller with the Schonstein photos.

"I was able to explain to Kim that every one of the Nuremberg rallies has a theme, and this rally was themed "The Rally of Honor,"' Altmiller said. "The photos had been taken in 1936, the third year after the rallies had moved to Nuremberg."
Ciak said each photo is numbered. The number goes up to 100, but 20 photos are missing, she said.
She doesn't know how her grandfather obtained the images. However, according to Yusko, it was common for military members to collect various souvenirs during their travels.
According to Altmiller, the photos were taken by Otto Schonstein, a Nazi sympathizer.  "He was a photographer who was very innovative, one of the people in the forefront of a stereoscopic photography, which was meant to show scenery and is the predecessor of our panoramic view," Altmiller said. "He was part of Hitler's unspoken propaganda team."



A Schonstein photo of Hitler in Munich, Germany 1939
Altmiller added the photos were likely part of an "elaborate" hardcover commemorative book that included transcripts of speeches, tickets to rallies and numerous newspaper articles.
"In the front cover, there would be this little door that opened up, and inside the door, there would be a 3-D viewer," she said. "You would take the viewer out and look at the book. It was a souvenir book similar to what you would pick up at the World's Fair, but this was the deluxe model."
Ciak said she found the photographs "surprising."
"It makes things hit home more, because you're not seeing these photos in a text book," she said. "Now you're seeing actual photos of these people." Altmiller agreed.
"They were absolutely chilling to look at," she said. "I teach this, I've seen video, I've read books, and I have been in Germany to study, but when you have seen someone's actual photos, it almost puts you in that place at that time."
Both Altmiller and Yusko said they have since shared the images with their classes. Altmiller said her classes were "taken back" when they saw the pictures.
As for the missing images, both instructors told Ciak to keep searching.  "I told her that a museum or a historical society would be very interested in having these," Yusko said. "When she first told me about them, I was expecting them to just be old photographs that perhaps a German family had taken, but when I saw them, I knew immediately that she had something extraordinary. It was a pretty historic find."

.....Leo Rommel, The Home-News and Tribune, New Brunswick, December 14, 2009

Nazis in the attic!  Disturbing!  Really, this is  a great find and a great follow-up by Spotswood educators.  According to a comment placed on the THNT website, the  Dobrzynski family will donate these stereostopic photos to the United States Holocaust Museum.

Today's Jersey Words:


We land in the fields where
the monarch butterflies go.
And we pray.
We pray for the living and the dead,
And I wake up praying,
And put on my work uniform,
And go to my shift factory job
Where I write this poem.

... from Mr. Danish and the Butterflies by Joe Weil, Elizabeth in What Remains

Keep writing,

Maureen

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