The Boy from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Mystery Behind the Holocaust’s Most Famous Photograph

Perhaps the most iconic image of the Warsaw Ghetto is the haunting photograph of a small boy with raised hands, emerging from a burning bunker, as a Nazi soldier aims his rifle at him with a sadistic grin twisting across his face.

The image was taken by a tall Nazi officer named Franz Konrad. It appears in the infamous “Stroop Report,” an album prepared by Jürgen Stroop, the SS general who crushed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to present as a “trophy of victory” to his superiors.

In the photo, the eyes of the captured Jews wander in all directions.
After days — perhaps weeks, hidden in a dark underground bunker, they are forced into the light, into a panoramic vision of ruin and death.

The Nazi Perpetrators Identified

Despite the chaos that surrounded the ghetto’s final days, researchers eventually identified nearly all 23 people appearing in the photograph.

The soldier holding the rifle has been identified as Josef Blösche, Stroop’s personal bodyguard. Blösche was a Gestapo officer notorious for his brutality, participating in the hunting and murder of Jews during the ghetto’s final year.

After the war, Blösche tried to hide his identity; his face had been horribly disfigured in an elevator accident, which helped him evade recognition for many years. He was finally captured 26 years later by East German authorities and put on trial for his crimes.

The Jewish Victims in the Photo

In stark contrast to their tormentors, historians have also managed to identify several of the Jewish victims in the image.

• The little girl seen glancing from the side is Hannah Lamet, age seven, who was murdered soon after the photograph was taken in Majdanek concentration camp.

• The woman standing to her right is her mother, Matilda Lamet, who survived the war and later immigrated to Israel.

• The teenager holding the white sack has been identified as Aharon Kartozinsky, age 14, who was killed in Auschwitz.

The Mystery of the Boy with Raised Hands

The central figure — the frightened little boy with his hands raised high, remains one of the greatest mysteries of Holocaust history.

Researchers and survivors have offered at least seven different names, yet none has been proven with certainty. Some believe he was Arthur Domb Szymiontek, but records show he was killed six months before the photo was taken. Others have suggested names such as Levi Zelinwarger, Tzvi Nussbaum, or Israel Rondel.

Each theory has evidence — and contradictions. It is entirely possible that none of them are correct, or that all are partly true, representing fragments of collective memory trying to give a name to the nameless.

A Symbol Beyond Identity

Ultimately, the boy’s identity remains unknown. We do not know whether he lived or died, or what became of him after the photograph was taken.

His anonymity has become symbolic — he stands not only for himself, but for the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, their names and faces lost to time, turned to ash, yet immortalized in this single haunting image.