Time of the Beasts

A picture is worth a thousand words. With 1,200 archival photographs, this album is the largest published collection of pictures presenting the facets of German and Soviet terror in the occupied Polish territories during World War II. While the school book chronicles the global conflict through numbers and names to be memorized, popular culture mostly concentrates on telling a good story, dazzling us with graphic depictions of wartime violence for dramatic effect. In this album, on the other hand, historical fact, captured on photographic plates and film, moves the reader on a much more personal level. The imagery contained within lends faces to the numbers, showing real people being driven from their homes, tortured, and killed, real persecutors tormenting and executing their victims, real bystanders, decision-makers, and accessories to the crimes, and real human bodies layered in mass graves or strewn about the cesspit that Polish soil was to its invaders. The photographs constitute a tribute to all victims of German and Soviet terror, depicting the plight of not only Poles but also Jews, the Sinti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, as well as the physically and mentally disabled. They also point to beacons of hope, highlighting individuals who, against all odds, held on to their humanity, often paying the ultimate price for it. Thus, the book inspires empathy and encourages a reflection on the human aspect of past and present wars, while simultaneously immersing the reader in the Polish and Eastern-European experience of World War II and the German and Soviet occupation. The selected iconographic material was compiled after analyzing the collections of the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance and many other institutions in Poland and abroad, consisting of tens of thousands of photographs. Months of meticulous detective work went into identifying and describing the events, places, and people depicted therein. These images, that are not just true but historically representative, take us on a journey to a particularly dark era in European history, to a place where we never want to return.