Stroop Photos - Captured Boy

The title of this iconic photo, from the Stroop Report, has an original title. Translated into English, it is: "Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs."

The picture was taken by an unknown photographer sometime between the 19th of April and the 16th of May, 1943. It depicts people being rounded up from the Warsaw Ghetto after Himmler sent in his troops to destroy it.

Much study has been made of this picture. No one is sure about the name of the little boy (Richard Raskin, in his book A Child at Gunpoint, concludes there are four possibilities), but four other individuals have been identified by surviving friends or relatives. They are:

Hanka Lamet - the small girl at the picture's far left. (At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, a page of testimony - number 90,540 - states that the child died at the Majdanek concentration camp.)

Matylda Lamet Goldfinger - the woman standing to the right of the little girl. It is her mother.

Leo Kartuzinsky - the lad with the white sack on his left shoulder.

Golda Stavarowski - the woman who is walking near the officers with her right arm raised.

The officer with the gun is Josef Blösche, an SS-Rottenführer. He was executed, for war crimes, in Leipzig on the 29th of July, 1969.

Click on the image for a larger view.