Jerzy Tomaszewski (code name “Jur”) - Polish resistance fighter, photographer and reporter.
Tomaszewski completed a clandestine course in photography in German-occupied Warsaw in 1940 at the age of 16.
Already a member of the Polish resistance, he began working at Studio Fotoris, a German photo-processing shop whose employees included a Polish underground cell. While processing and printing Nazi propaganda photographs and snapshots taken by ordinary German soldiers - which frequently depicted atrocities - Tomaszewski copied them onto microfilms which were then smuggled to London to enable the Polish government-in-exile to publicise evidence of German war crimes.
In 1943 the Gestapo raided Studio Fotoris after uncovering the underground cell but Tomaszewski escaped. He was transferred to a secret photo-lab on Chmielna Street. During his time there he copied the now famous photograph of the murder of Jews in the village of Ivanhorod by the SS, which was intercepted at the Warsaw post office by members of the Polish resistance.
When the Warsaw Uprising began on 1st August 1944, Tomaszewski was one of several photographers who were given the task of documenting the course of the battle. He took nearly 2000 photographs of the uprising until he was wounded and arrested by the Germans on 6th September 1944.
Tomaszewski was deported to the Pruszków detention camp, but managed to escape and go into hiding. In February 1945 he returned to the ruins of Warsaw (now under Soviet occupation) and assumed that his negatives had been lost in the carnage.
Many years later, in June 1975, he saw an advertisement in a Warsaw newspaper from someone who was looking for him. This turned out to be Wacława Zacharska, a comrade from the wartime resistance who he had not seen or heard from since 1944. Zacharska had hidden Tomaszewski's negatives in metal cans and preserved them after the war.
In 1977 he organised the first exhibition of his Warsaw Uprising photographs. Two years later Tomaszewski published a photo-anthology called "Epizody Powstania Warszawskiego" (Episodes From The Warsaw Uprising).
Tomaszewski was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta on 29th July 2007. He died in Warsaw on 26th January 2016, shortly after his 92nd birthday.
Five of Jerzy Tomaszewski’s Warsaw Uprising photos....
Polish partisans of the Radosław Group in the Wola district
A girl in front of her bombed out home on Królewska Street
A Polish partisan in position behind a barricade on Mazowiecka Street
A boy from the Scout Postal Service on Solec Street
A group of Polish resistance fighters pictured after arriving in the city centre from the Old Town via the sewers
